


A Good Kicking

by chr1711



Category: The Sweeney (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:55:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 49,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25647655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chr1711/pseuds/chr1711
Summary: London, the early 2000s. An African prince is kidnapped and not all the suspects are of this Earth. DI Cordelia Evans investigates.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> “A Good Kicking” was written in 2008, though the setting is early summer of either 2003 or 2004: the 11th September 2001 attacks are a recent memory, and while people use email and websites there are no social media nor smartphones. The remains of White City and the Mail Coach Inn, as lamented by Pat Moynihan, were demolished in May 2003. David Blunkett was Home Secretary (i.e. Minister for law and order) between 2001 and the end of 2004.  
> You may ask how it is a ‘Sweeney’ fanfic, but the situations and a lot of quotes are straight from that series. Also ask yourself how Cordelia got her name: in King Lear Cordelia is a sister of Regan. Luke Francis is my attempt at a present-day George Carter.  
> Moreford (a south-west London suburb with resemblance to Kingston upon Thames) is fictional, as is the nation of Alako.  
> Sex work between consenting adults is legal in the UK, although living off immoral earnings and ‘keeping a disorderly house’ are not.

It was the morning of my fifteenth birthday, I was playing football along with the rest of the Lower Fourth, and three men came running out of the woods straight at me.  
Well, of course I was surprised. Especially when the first one of them rugby tackled me and I went smacking into the ground knees first.  
I gaped at my fellow fourth formers who were now at odd angles against the sky as my poor abused body hit the earth.  
The two other guys picked me up by an arm each and dragged me away. I think that even then I knew what was going on. Although Father and the Queen had been dismissive of the possibilities, and ours was a peaceful nation with no real enemies, there were always people stupid enough or desperate enough to try it.  
Father, in his large Quaker way, handwaved all possibilities like this.  
"Ignore it, my boy," he would say, scoffing his way through a box of Carr's Biscuits. Carr had been founded by Quakers, he would explain, and for that reason it was his duty to eat as many of their products as possible. He was what used to be called a Gay Quaker - one who didn't take the puritan precepts of the Friends quite that literally. The Queen, naturally, follows the old Yedjé religion which isn't puritanical at all, and neither is she.  
The Queen isn't my mother, by the way. If she were I'd be a Prince Royal and thus likely to inherit the throne. I suspect however that my assailants weren't au fait with the nuances, that say that a minor Prince isn't really anything more than a palace monkey, a by blow who's kept around for appearances. My mother died six years ago, of the Fever. I think Father started in on the biscuits after that, but it didn't stop the Queen making her move on him.  
As expendable Prince Samuel, I was sent to Jericho School in England with some idea that I'd follow several of the Queen's offspring to Oxford.  
At one point a Swedish backpacker who'd dropped in on a Royal Tea Party - they tend to be open house affairs, foreigners especially welcome - was heard to remark that "Harvard's better than Oxford or Cambridge."  
Though nobody said so to poor old pacifist Father, the lad was let go his merry way and a few kilometres down the Chakapi Road he was oh-so-accidentally set upon by a gang of brigands who kicked his expensive teeth in and stole his rucksack and his wallet. The Queen was wandering around with quite a happy smile for some time after that happened.  
Ah yes, the Queen. Let me explain the Queen to you.  
Her full name is Queen Hanaruka Lamotte Adruga Yeshi Idje Majapura but she is generally known as Queen Hannah or Her Majesty. Unlike Father who seems to simply be dissolving in carbohydrates, she is a large woman also fat. Taking her cue from that other quasi-African female monarch Queen Ranavalona I of Madagascar, she is scarily efficient, had a wall built around the country when it became clear the people of neighbouring Asantia didn't have enough to eat ... yes? She paid the Asanti to build it. Then she told them they couldn't come in, and as for the rest: if there were any Asanti people in the kingdom (and she knew very well there were), they could get out.   
Asanti are and have for several centuries been personae non gratae in our kingdom, and given that their sole contribution to our nation's culture is mugging, you can't be surprised. At least the Queen had the guts to chuck them out, back to where they belong, or so she says.  
The Queen lives in a redbrick palace on the outskirts of the capital city, Akdaro, and Father, as Consort, is designated a suite of rooms there when he isn't living in our five-room apartment on Boulevard Sese Seko.  
He's quite modern, is Father, despite the biscuit fetish or maybe because of it. In case you start thinking he's just an appendage, he - Doctor Albert Tallu - is a successful lawyer. He speaks French and Ako, as we all do, but also Kilolo, English, and German. The last two so he can deal with foreign businesspeople, the first so he can get better prices in the street-market: a lot of farmers are Kilolo. I think he'd like me to go into the legal business, and certainly Jericho has a reputation for churning out law students; but it isn't really what I want to do.   
Telling Father I want to be an artist would be a really, really bad move. Quakers don't trust the visual arts, even Gay Quakers. He'd sit there in the chilly airconned room of the Sese Seko apartment and declaim, in between biscuits,  
"The arts are a delusion and a snare. They are lies. They do not tell the truth and they do not help us to be aware of God."  
"But they can," I said, "they are a means to tell the truth in the best way possible. When I draw a picture I try to get close to reality. To the perfection of the subject."  
Mostly I draw monkeys and girls. Sometimes you can even tell the difference. Books, I added silently, are complete lies.  
"Blasphemy," Father suggested gently. "Only God can create."  
"Not creation, father," I insisted. "Mere imitation." Above my room in the School House there is an ink drawing of a girl called Lucine: we were both fourteen at the time. For some reason the other boys are quite respectful of her and of the drawing, because everything else makes them behave like a pack of monkeys. I suppose there was that little incident where I thumped Medford ma. when he pulled down one of my pictures, one of the water station at Kolokolo. I actually knocked him through the thin wall between my room and Truscott's. Nobody was more surprised than I was. Well, tell a lie, I suspect Medford was. Truscott would have been if he hadn't been sneaking a crafty gif behind the tool shed.  
I think Father wants me to marry Lucine. She is the daughter of General Bologo, and a marriage between the military and the ruling caste would be made in heaven. Lucine's nice but she's a bit wet. She subscribes to a New Age magazine from London and wears crystal pendants and Egyptian symbols that she doesn't know the meaning of.  
One morning a year before I went to school in England, I walked into the palace, passing by a row of heads that had until very recently adorned the necks of a group of American evangelists, and now served as finials to a set of iron spikes. Occasional gobbets of blood splatted onto the floor below them. They were that fresh. Entering the main courtyard, a huge red-tiled space interrupted by frangipani trees, where green and red parakeets twittered and swooped about, lined by arched walls decorated with Moorish tiles, a space cornered by blue-white minarets and open to the cool blue coastal sky; entering that huge space I beheld the blue silk-clad figure of Lucine orbiting the mighty Queen like a tug accompanying an ocean liner. As I drew closer I could hear Lucine twittering like a parakeet. The day hadn't yet got hot, and the shadows were still long beneath the trees.  
"No, no," said the Queen. "I know nothing about it."  
"But it's our history," Lucine said.   
"So you say," the Queen replied. "I think you read about it in one of your magazines."  
"What's that?" I asked, once I had bowed to the Queen.  
"Your little friend," said the Queen, "has heard of a .. what was it? A manuscript."  
"Discovered in Ukolo," Lucine said. "Seven hundred years ago by Italian merchants. Nobody's ever been able to decipher it. But it came from here. And you know what?"  
"No," I said, amused. "What?"  
"It contains star maps," Lucine said. "Maps of stellar systems the ancients didn't know about. And paintings of weird creatures, things like extinct prehistoric animals and furry men. But it was old even then, Sam, when the Italians found it. And it came from here."  
"Where did you hear this?" I asked. Interested despite myself. Maps and paintings and things like that do interest me.  
"From my friend in New York," she said. "Peggy Chong. She's into all this, like me. She emailed me about it."  
"Oh," said the Queen. "America. Land of the Gullible. Did your little penfriend check her sources?"  
"She's thirteen," Lucine said.   
"So?" I said.  
"So she can't have made all that up," said Lucine. "Anyhow, I checked. I don't think it's a hoax."  
"But what does it all mean?" the Queen said.  
"That we had an ancient starfaring civilisation," Lucine said.  
"It means," said the Queen, "that people from here had an imagination. Now," she pointed to me, "your father the Consort doesn't like the sound of that, but I do. I expect little Lucine read in her magazine that the Egyptians didn't build the Pyramids, that they were built by aliens. But you know why Americans and suchlike believe that? No?  
"Let me tell you," as though we wouldn't have.  
"It's because they don't want to believe that brown people like us can think of anything for ourselves. The Ancient Egyptians did build the Pyramids, and their descendants are living there now. Now, please excuse me, children, I have some Martians to contact on the astral plane."  
She winked, and waddled off.  
"She's allright really," I said, seeing Lucine was looking annoyed.  
"'Spose so," Lucine said. "But she didn't understand about the manuscript."  
"Tell me all about it," I said teasingly. Lucine nearly said a Bad Word but swallowed it just in time.  
"I did," she said. We wandered over to sit beneath a tree. A silence of several minutes followed while I looked at the light and shade behind the trees on the far side of the courtyard, and wondered how best to show the way the light rippled as a breeze went through the leaves and a brief scream came from the grilles set into the floor. If we did ever get married I could imagine silences of the awkward variety being quite long. It was a shame. Lucine was pretty and quite clever, but she did believe in all this old toot.  
"Anyway," I said, "this manuscript of yours."  
"Yes?" Lucine said, suddenly animated as I was finally taking an interest.  
"What did you mean, nobody's been able to decipher it? What's it written in?"  
"Nobody knows," Lucine said. "It's an unknown script and not obviously a code. The most likely language for something written around here in that time is Arabic but it doesn't correspond to Arabic at all. Ako wasn't even written then."  
"So they say," I pointed out. "Maybe we had an alphabet and lost it."  
"It's been tried," Lucine said, quashing my world-changing theory. "It doesn't correspond to Ako or any other language from this region."  
"I see," I said. A breakaway group of parakeets was swarming under the trees ready to go over the wall. A coatimundi loped in the shade, seeking insects and small animals. Coatis are omnivores; like their owner they eat everything. There was another, longer scream.  
"I think your furry men are gorillas," I said as a last-ditch defence.  
"I think so too," Lucine said, and got up and walked back to the main gate.

***

Jack Chandler was a man so convinced of the basic untrustworthiness of life that he no longer had a wife, never saw his children - Eulalia, aged seven, and Isla, aged four - and lived in a terraced house in the outer London suburb of Moreford. The address was 821 Richmond Road; next door was 817. For some reason there was no 819. Chandler was a teacher at Jericho School, a few kilometres down the road on the outskirts of a small English village. Moreford was half London, half Surrey, a town in a bend of the River Thames, and Chandler had been living there since he was married, though not all the time in this house. In common with many other residents of the area, when he moved he moved within the area, as it had all the amenities he needed and none of the hassle of central London. He could hear the rain on the window panes at night, there was so little traffic.  
The external appearance of this house was misguidingly plain: a simple grey stone elevation with a red painted door in the centre, flat-fronted and with a single window above it which often loomed out of the mist like a gigantic cyclopean eye.  
The external appearance of Chandler was medium height, thin and unathletic, with receding sandy hair and a narrow jaw. Though he had always detested team sports, he went walking at weekends, his holidays were more likely to be spent in the mountains than at the beach, he had a subscription to the local sports centre, and he rode a bicycle. Even so, he still contrived to look like the schoolteacher he was.  
Inside the house, though, he had rebelled against the twentieth-century monochrome and Pawsonian minimalism with a quirky colourfulness; less Pawson than his Italian counterpart. Mechanical birds tweeted at the casual visitor on the landing. A reproduction of El Lissitzky's painting Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge was visible on the far wall, for when you stepped inside it was right into the living room without benefit of passageway nor hall -  
Chandler remembered a story his father, a council housing officer until he retired, used to tell. He was visiting an indigent family in one of the poorer areas of south London, and was asking the tenant about her gas and electricity services. Unable to see the gas meter he asked her:  
"Where's the meter? In the hall?"  
The woman looked up at him from her full suspicious one metre fifty.  
"You may 'ave an 'all," she said.  
"We 'as a passidge."  
Inside himself, also, he was more varied than the outside would suggest.

The girl who called herself Carola was snuggled into one end of Chandler's long white sofa, and the schoolteacher was sitting next to her with an arm draped around her shoulders, and occasionally kissing her. She had a leg over one of his and apart from a minimal lace negligée she was naked. Chandler was wearing only his boxer shorts. In front of them on a low glass table there were two glasses: one of diet cola, one of white wine.  
Carola was slender, tall, and with long dark-blonde hair. She had a girl next door look, if the girl next door was twenty years old, Czech, and gorgeous. This was the second time the 37-year-old Chandler had had the girl here, and although they had had sex, they'd spent a lot of the time swapping stories. The last time Chandler went to her home town of Prague was on the trail of Rabbi Loew, who allegedly built an artificial man, animated with a piece of paper in the mouth ... a golem according to Jewish lore, but there were elements of it that suggested this was no ordinary golem, rather some kind of robot than a man made of clay. He wanted to find out the truth behind it, and while lurking around spires as dreaming as those of Oxford, spoke in interpretation to several scholars and researched in libraries whose racks held ancient tomes in a multitude of languages.  
That was half term. Then it was back to school and teaching a bunch of fairly enthusiastic teenagers. Some of them were even enthusiastic about the subject he taught them.  
No, that was unfair. Jericho School, a few km into the countryside from Moreford, was set up to breed the nation's next generation of leaders. It had a reputation for law students but that wasn't the all of it. Chandler found they had an enthusiasm for history especially when you kept away from the boring lists of kings and battles and concentrated on the scurrilous stuff and the representation of English history as one of rebellion, which Official History said it wasn't, but it was; depending on how you looked at it.  
A hand stroked Carola's belly, reaching further down, stroking, and Carola's hand stroked in counterpart, the front of Chandler's boxer shorts which were beginning to feel extremely cramped. She slipped long, caressing fingers around his cock through the fabric.  
Then the phone rang.  
"Let it," Chandler said, and kissed the girl.  
"No," she said, pushing him away. "Answer it."  
Something in her voice made him obey; perhaps only the possibility of more sex after he'd dealt with the call, perhaps something else.  
He picked up the receiver.  
"Chandler," said a voice. Jack's heart sank. The Headmaster.  
"Sir," Chandler said.  
"What were you doing? You sound odd."  
"I was, sir," Chandler said, "about to indulge in sexual intercourse with a very attractive young lady."  
Let's see how you deal with that, Chandler thought. He remembered a story about the urbane Master of a Cambridge college who had invited a dour Presbyterian minister to dine at his High Table. The Master had unwisely offered the minister a glass of wine.  
"Drink?" the minister thundered. "I would sooner commit adultery!"  
To which the Master said, "Who wouldn't?"  
But there was no spluttering or ahem-ing.  
"No time for that," the Headmaster said. "Prince Samuel has been abducted."  
Oh my god. Chandler's consciousness did a backflip.  
"Abducted ... sir?"  
"From the football pitch, Chandler. Get back here at once, on the double."  
"Sir," Jack said. He put down the phone.  
"Trouble," Carola said. It wasn't a question.  
"One of my students," Chandler said. "He's been kidnapped. I have to go."  
They got dressed, and left together. Carola tucked the envelope containing ten twenty-pound notes into the inside pocket of her coat.   
"Give you a lift?" Chandler asked.  
"I'll walk," Carola said. "No point you being seen with me."  
"I don't mind," Chandler said, but he reached his car and climbed in, leaving the girl to walk to the bus stop.

***

It rained on the way to the school; at first intermittently, so he flicked the wipers over occasionally, and then hard, which at least gave the car a wash, but did nothing to ease Chandler's mood.  
He tried to remember if he'd ever told the Head he believed one of the kids would be kidnapped some day; wondered if there was any mileage in saying "I told you so". And if he remembered correctly what he'd heard about Sam's family, there would be hell to pay.  
And poor Sam, of course, also. The boy was a good student; a little full of himself, but then he was a prince, and one who stood no chance of ever becoming king, so he could play the part to the full. He did have the attitude that he was at school to learn, even if he had avowedly intended to become an artist, against his family's inclination. Naturally these days there were no one-to-one coaching sessions in Chandler's rooms; the Headmaster was cravenly afraid of lawsuits and never caught Chandler's drift when he suggested that the head of a school specialising in law students ought really to be able to conduct its own defence in the event of malicious prosecution.  
"Could always give them a kicking, sir," Chandler suggested, sitting in one of the Head's black leather Barcelona chairs. The Head, whose entire demeanour suggested a livid pepperpot, appeared to vibrate a little and clench out the word  
"No!"  
So be it.  
When Chandler arrived at Jericho School, there was already a police cordon across the main gates, blue and white tape, flashing blue lights everywhere and police in flak jackets, one quite plainly carrying an unpleasant-looking automatic weapon. Somewhere the softly-softly approach had got lost in a much larger-scale paranoia.   
"I work here," Chandler said up to the blond face of the young policeman who stopped him.  
"If you could verify that," the cop said.  
"It's allright," said a voice. Susanna Van Tromp, the Modern Languages head, swanning over to snow the cop with a cool accent and a five-hundred-metre look (the modern equivalent of a thousand-yard stare and nowhere near as scary). "This is Mister Chandler. He taught - teaches - Samuel in the Fourth."  
"Okay," said the policeman and let Chandler drive through. He looked up at Susanna as he went past and he caught a look - an imploring look perhaps - from her.  
Further into the school there were cops everywhere, and boys and girls, all herded into the main hall, where they were brought out by ones and twos, the Head and the other staff interviewing them one by one, even the ones who hadn't been there and hadn't seen Sam be taken. But bit by bit the story was coming out.  
"A black truck," Muazzam Ali said. "In the woods. A Mercedes, I think."  
"It drove off?"  
"It drove off," Ali concurred. "As soon as they bundled Sam into it." The boy was visibly shaken; he came from a wealthy Jordanian family and no doubt thought it could just as easily have been him. Well, it could, Chandler thought. As well him as the son of a family from an obscure West African country, a former French colony that nowadays seemed content to bask in the sun and do not very much other than haggle for the best prices for its bauxite and copper. If Alako had oil it would probably have ruined the country; one or other major power would have been in there, driving rigs into the very flesh of the earth, and invading as soon as it looked like the natives were getting restless; but Alako's wealth, such as it was, was in minerals and people were a lot less rapacious about them.  
"Have you heard anything from the kidnappers?" Chandler asked the officer in charge, Detective Inspector Evans, a small compact redhaired woman.  
"No," Evans said. "Nothing as yet. We'll keep you informed. I suppose Sam didn't tell you he was afraid he might be ... taken? You were one of his main teachers, after all."  
"No," Chandler said. "I don't think he ever mentioned it. His family aren't rich, not really."  
"Could be mistaken identity," said Evans's sidekick, Detective Sergeant Luke Francis. Chandler wondered if Francis had been put on the case because he was black.  
"It could," Evans said. "You say not really rich, Mister Chandler. What do you mean by that exactly? I mean, are we comparing with the sort of people who'll sink a yacht just for jolly, wouldn't you? Or do we mean by comparison with people who haven't got enough to eat?"  
"They're reasonably well off," Chandler said, "by West African standards. A nice flat in town, a little house in the family's village, enough food, a few cattle. His father is the Queen's Consort, though. A kind of very close confidant. The Consort's children have honorary royal rank. Like a life peerage, if you follow me."  
"I see," said Evans.   
"So that might have made a kidnapper think he was a bigger deal than he really is. You go to other countries like Poland or Russia, the title 'Prince' is practically given away with breakfast cereal. But the only real driver is Queen Hannah. Autocrat and ... well, some of the stories Sam's told me, I wonder if it's the imagination of a sex-crazed fifteen-year-old - that's to say, a fifteen-year-old - or whether she really is like that."  
"How unlike the home life of our own dear Queen," Francis mused.  
"Quite," Chandler said. "They castrate teenage fathers, did you know that? Stops people breeding too early and becoming a burden on their people. Think old Blunketty-Blunk would go for it? It'd make a change from copying the Americans all the time...."  
Evans frowned.  
"That'll be all, thankyou," she said. "We'll let you know if we need to talk to you again."

Well, I ballsed that up, Chandler thought. They'll be suspecting me next. All that talk about castration ... you expect the police to be on the right politically but really they're as centre as you can get. It helps, I suppose. Still, it's our own silly fault if we let that blind git impose policies that wouldn't look out of place in an Ayn Rand novel. To think he used to be a Communist back in his Sheffield days! I'd let him work out that castrating teenage fathers leads to an increase in illegal abortions as the boys try to have a shag and keep their nads at the same time.  
Chandler walked back across the quad, a square of grass held in the U of the main school buildings. The rain hadn't let up entirely; specks of rain hit him in the face as he walked. It seemed appropriate. A crow strutted on the grass but Chandler didn't even have the energy to scare it off, though he'd have liked to. Finally it flapped off and perched on a corner of the roof, where it croaked hoarsely.


	2. Chapter 2

I should have stayed in the Navy, DI Cordelia Evans thought. I was happy there.  
It was three in the morning and the incident room was still on the go, fuelled by coffee and occasional hints at information. But there was nothing real to go on; no real intimation of why this young man was snatched from his school. Normally kidnappers contacted the victim's parents or the police with some kind of demand. The boy's father was flying in from Akdaro with a senior Alako police officer, later this day. He had been uncannily restrained for a father and lawyer; Evans had expected he'd bluster about fat lawsuits and make all kind of threats. It was a cultural thing, she presumed. We've become the people who scream and shout and threaten. We didn't used to be.  
She stood at the window and looked down into a street empty but for cars parked by the kerb, and a solitary cat nosing along the pavement. It was still raining and the orange streetlight opposite caught a shoal of raindrops in its amber halo. Mean streets, she thought. It had been hard stopping Scotland Yard from muscling in on this case, but Moreford could handle it, for now anyway. The last thing she wanted was the SCS or the Flying Squad coming along for the ride somewhere they didn't understand. Provided Detective Superintendent Halloran kept the heavy mob off her back she could get on with the investigation. Halloran had cut his teeth on that kind of political manoeuvring at Hammersmith nick, only to migrate to the suburbs a few years ago when he made D. Supt.  
The night had been spent amassing information; everything about the missing boy. Everything about Alako, which most of her officers had barely heard of. She, twelve years ago, a midshipman on HMS Intransigent, had been there for a brief shore stop. The stop hadn't even been scheduled; mechanical problems meant they headed for the nearest port which was Ukolo. Her memories of the place faded into others of Africa; the desert brown and yellow in the distance, black people in white robes on the quayside, a town of white buildings dotted with blue-and-white minarets, and always the heat as soon as the sun was over the horizon. In its favour, it was clean, it didn't look desperately poor and the sailors were not mobbed as soon as they set foot ashore. In other places the locals turned out like rats.  
"Behave yourselves," they were told, "and the locals'll behave themselves. This lot are civilised."  
She believed it, and had never seen any reason to go back on that opinion. That the Queen was by all accounts a bit of a monster, didn't alter the decency of the people.  
Besides, only a bit of a monster, if that were possible. Evans's main current theory was that the boy had been taken by Queen Hannah's political enemies. She would certainly have had some, but there was no evidence that she starved her people to feed herself; far from it, despite some draconian laws she seemed to care that the population was fed and watered. It was just that there were some lines you didn't want to overstep with her, and she seemed to believe quite firmly in the curative powers of selective violence: the firm smacking of Government, as a Guardian article had called it eighteen months ago.  
But there were no organised groups that she could find; a long phone call to a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and another to the chief of police in Akdaro, had confirmed this. Alako seemed to have avoided fundamentalism; although a large proportion of the population were Muslim and a slightly smaller number Christian, neither seemed too strenuous about it. The only group the Queen really seem to have upset was the Asanti.  
"She hates them," the SOAS professor, Jane Tarbuck, had said. "Since she came to power in '79 she's expelled about nine tenths of the Asanti. Sent them back over the wall."  
"Which wall is that?"  
"She had a wall built," Tarbuck explained. "Between the mountains and the frontier with Mauritania, along the border with Asantia."  
"And suppose they came back over the wall?"  
"They could," Tarbuck supposed, "it isn't that heavily guarded. We're not talking the Berlin Wall here, more of a formal border; two metres or so high with a gate and a couple of sentry posts in it. I don't think they have come back though, not in any numbers. They're more likely to head south, to Senegal and the Gambia."  
"It'd only take a few," Evans said. "Do you think there could be an Asanti group operating here?"  
"I've never heard of one," Tarbuck admitted, "I don't know of any Asantis in the UK at all. Certainly none at SOAS."  
Asantis, Evans wrote down. Cell operating in UK?  
"Why does she hate them?" Evans asked. "The Queen, I mean."  
"She says they're criminals," Tarbuck said. "But it feeds itself, doesn't it? Asantis are discriminated against, so they turn to crime. They don't really look different - a bit darker possibly."  
"Darker?" Evans said. "You mean there's a race angle?"  
"Well, yess," Tarbuck replied cagily, "but not by colour. The Ako are mostly brown, but some are as pale as Europeans, and some are as dark as Black Africans. Their origin is Berber, but they've intermarried with Arabs, Africans and Europeans. The Asanti haven't mixed so much. They mostly follow the old tribal religions, but then so does the Queen. They have their own language, I suppose that counts."  
"Does it?"  
"I think so. Do you speak Welsh, DI Evans?"  
"No," Evans said. "I was born here. But I see what you mean. You can't understand what they're saying about you."  
"Quite," Tarbuck said. "The Asanti also live in the poorest part of the country, up towards the desert. Other than that, I suppose, it's someone to hate, someone to blame when things go wrong. A scapegoat. They get driven out into the desert, too. Excuse me, Detective Inspector. I'm tired."  
Faces, Cordelia wrote. Asantis again.  
"Thankyou, Professor."  
"You're welcome. Call me again if you need more help."

***

They had me in there for days before I had any idea why they'd kidnapped me. I was kept in a little farmhouse, a small white building with rustic furniture, the sort of place property magazines are full of. Hardly what I was expecting.  
What was I expecting? A cellar, I think, somewhere dank with hot and cold running rats. Instead the view from my window was green fields. I could have run, but where would I have run to? I had no idea where 'here' was. I was in a foreign land, green and pleasant maybe. But like Rachel in tears amid the alien corn.  
Nor did I have any idea why. My abducters appeared rarely and I was usually given food by an aged man who could not have been one of the three who took me. He was kind enough but looked at me as though I was something strange which to him I was, no doubt.   
I was used to it by now - nearly. There were plenty of other African kids at the school, but we aren't quite like other Africans. Nobody, here or elsewhere, knows what to make of us.  
This, though, this was the England if not of picture boxes, at least the one that feeds people; I could hear the drone of agricultural equipment in the distance and vehicles going past on the road that can't have been more than a few hundred metres from the house. Occasionally one of my captors came in; the one I'd decided to call Vassily, for no reason other than he had a pronounced Russian accent and his hair was greasy (work it out). He was a short man, broad like some kind of animal, and twenty years ago I suppose, or in a James Bond movie, he'd have been a KGB heavy. He wore a grubby pair of jeans and a leather jacket. I occasionally glimpsed him in the yard talking to the old man, or to one of the other two who I thought must have been the other abductors. I was sure the people who'd taken me were all male, and there were no other reasonably young males around. The other two were also both white, one perhaps a little older than the other - maybe forty, with thick greying hair and a lined face. The younger was possibly thirty, and he wore T-shirts with rock band logos on them. I never spoke to either of them. I hardly ever got a word out of Vassily either. They left me to my own devices. One day Vassily came into the house when I was sitting watching televison: not something they stopped me doing either. I spent my days watching TV, reading from the handful of books in the house, or drawing. They let me have paper and pencils. Without those I think I might have gone nuts right away.  
"Why am I here?" I asked him.  
"You know why," he said.  
"I don't," I said. "My father will have me found, you bet."  
"I don't think so," Vassily said. The television news was on: American troops were covering ground into Iran, claiming Teheran would fall within a week; a mysterious earthquake in China had killed a hundred people, and a Premier League footballer was dismissed from his team for being gay, or so it seemed. I was astonished at the amount of coverage given on British television to football: not just the matches but also the amount of speculation and insider dealing that really wasn't interesting to me at all. At Jericho enough of the boys were not British that league football wasn't really an issue; I could imagine that if everyone had been native the obsession would have carried into the school. There was nothing on the news about the kidnapping of a minor African prince.  
I could almost say I missed Jericho. There were a lot of things I hated about it; primarily that my dad and the Queen had sent me away to a foreign country instead of keeping me close to the family, which is where a son belongs, or a daughter for that matter. Suppose I needed to talk to them about something? There was the phone and email, it's true, but they weren't the same thing.  
Yes, I liked being independent, but the kind of independence when you could go back at the end. I liked hanging out with my friends and although I'd made mates at Jericho, most of the boys were so full of braggadocio it was hard to talk to them, and the girls were cliquey. Compared with most of them I even missed Lucine.   
Oh yes, Lucine. If she kept her mouth shut about Flying Saucers from Venus she was really quite a nice girl. She was certainly nice-looking. Tall and slim, with a cloud of black hair, and a pretty face that somehow reminded you of a pussycat; skin the brown of milky coffee, dark eyes and a white smile. I didn't think I could ever marry her but I have to admit I'd occasionally had one off the wrist thinking about that slender body.  
But there were some pretty girls at Jericho. I'd been told that English girls were ugly, but that seems to have been a racist slur; some of them were quite stunning, and I'd never seen so many blondes in one place. Some of them flirted but the goss was that they were unattainable for mere foreigners like me. Then again there were the foreign girls; the only one I really got close to was Afi Shahaz, who was Iranian, and a lot like a shorter, curvier version of Lucine except that she seemed to be a level-headed person and didn't believe in Lucine's hippy-dippy stuff. She was a Muslim but she didn't let it get in the way of having a good time. We'd kissed at the end of term disco but got no further than wandering hands.  
"We're friends," she said. "Do you like being friends?"  
"Very much," I said. Friends it was. I had the occasional swift self-help session in the toilets to Afi, though, too.  
Her mother and father had an apartment in Kensington. One afternoon, when we were sitting together round the back of School House, she suggested I could go and see her in the holidays.   
"We could go to the pictures at the Odeon," she said, "and go for a walk in Holland Park. It's really nice. Then there's a Haagen-Dazs along there. I could let you buy me an icecream."  
This idea I could really relate to. Only now the Americans had invaded her homeland, and I didn't know what effect that would have; and then this had happened.  
"Vassily," I asked the next time the Russian came in, "could this be mistaken identity? My family isn't rich, you know. I think you've got the wrong boy."  
Then I thought about the implications of what I'd said. I could identify Vassily and the others. What was to stop them shooting me through the back of the head and burying my body somewhere on the farm? I'd seen no guns so far, and only heard the occasional distant bang that would have been a farmer shooting a rabbit, but that didn't mean they didn't have any.  
"You are not wrong boy," Vassily said. "You are right boy."  
"Then why am I here?"  
Vassily drew a finger across his throat. He smiled as he said it, but that didn't make it any more pleasant.  
"My name not Vassily," he said.   
"What is your name?" I asked.  
"Never you mind," he said, and left.  
When I was left alone this time, because of the threat, I cried for the first time since they'd taken me. I felt very alone and abandoned. What right had my dad to dump me in this far country and not do anything about it when his boy was in trouble? Didn't the Queen give a shit? Didn't the police … well, maybe the police were working on this night and day, but I had no evidence of it. Then, if I really wanted to get started, what about Mama?  
Well, what about Mama? I remember her being a quiet, patient woman who produced one child and then set about methodically bringing that child up as well as she could, except that when the Fever swept through Alako, she was one of three thousand people who didn't recover. I still feel bad about that; Dad and I talked about it and we thought it was because neither of us were touched by the Fever at all. I didn't even feel slightly warm, far less have the purple skin blotches and the shortness of breath that finally led to death for so many. The Fever - if it's spelt with a capital F it refers only to that one disease - was a major catastrophe for our country. In six months, one in four hundred people died of it; if that was applied to the UK it would be 150,000 dead, and in the USA, 625,000. Nobody's even sure what it was. Our best medical personnel - who are pretty good, trained in Oxford and Paris and at Johns Hopkins - couldn't get further than its having an airborne vector, and causing death by obstructing the airways. Some kind of swamp fever? A targeted organism designed to wipe out entire populations? It depended how paranoid you wanted to be. Lucine thought it was a CIA experiment, but then, she would. Some people tried to blame the Asanti - Alako's Jews, as the writer and journo Simon Kwesi put it, blamed for everything - but it didn't really wash as the Asanti mostly live up country and you couldn't deny the Fever started around the port.  
Poor Lucine. She'd survived the Fever, but lost a brother to it, which might explain why she was such a mixed-up poppet. The Queen, meanwhile, almost agreed with Lucine, for once in her life, though it would have annoyed her if you'd suggested she was in the confidences of a fifteen-year-old girl. To the Queen the Fever was further evidence of the perfidy of foreigners. It had originated in Ukolo, which meant it probably came off a ship. The only foreign ship in port at the time the Fever started was a Taiwanese freighter, the Shing Ho Star. Further investigation a year after the Fever struck showed that the Shing Ho Star was no longer in existence. Possibly scuppered for insurance money, but possibly, as the Queen and Lucine both thought, there was more to it than that. The captain, a Filipino called Fernando Ruiz Carvajal, had also vanished. Probably died of the Fever also but, again, maybe not. Certainly there was no news of the Fever breaking out anywhere else around the world. Alako had, it seemed, been singled out by some bizarre agency for attack.  
Just like me, really.

***

"We need a result," DI Cordelia Evans said. "The kidnappers have not been in touch. I think we need to instigate a house to house search of the villages around the area of Jericho School."  
"You think he's being held locally?" DS Francis asked. "And not for ransom? Otherwise we'd have heard by now."  
"That," Evans said, turning away from the incident board, "is the theory." She'd pinned up a large black and white photograph of the missing boy in the centre of the board. Nice looking kid; obviously mixed race, intelligent-looking as well. Maybe there was some kind of race or sex angle, if it wasn't money. This had begun to pick away at her consciousness more and more as nothing was heard. She looked at her watch. The boy's father and the Alako cop were due any minute. She'd had a phone call saying they were at Heathrow, half an hour ago.  
"What would you do?" Evans asked. "If you had someone hostage and wanted money, you wouldn't wait, would you? You'd get in touch with the police or with someone. No, I don't think this is about the money." If it wasn't money, you never knew what might happen. The motivations of your regular money-driven crooks were simple: an equation. A equals amount of money available, B equals risk involved in getting money. If A equals or exceeds B, the result is a blag, a kidnapping or similar. But if it was political they'd also have heard, and the political often drove the monetary; terror groups needed funding, or else quite simply villains dressed up blags to look like politics, a style popular in the 1960s and 70s (the SLA came to mind) but less so in the decades since. With the rise of terrorism in the early 2000s, though, the political disguise could easily come back into fashion, along with orange and purple décor, flared trousers, and funk. The Asantis, though, had kept silent, and so had everyone else.  
So, as they hadn't heard, maybe the poor boy was being held prisoner by racists or a pervert, and you couldn't tell what they would do. The equations were unique to each individual.  
"Did we get anything on the Asantis?" Evans asked.  
"No, guv," Francis said. "There are a few in London, and there's a social centre for them in Hackney. I spoke to a Mrs Falolo, but she didn't think there was any political involvement in London, which makes them pretty unique if you ask me."  
"Tell me about it," Evans said. "A holiday camp for thieves and weirdoes. It might be worth going in person. DC Carver!"  
"Ma'am?"  
"Go with Luke, and talk to …"  
"Mrs Denise Falolo," Francis said. "Asanti Social Centre, 117 Mare Street, Hackney."  
"Okay," said Evans. "There. Go into the Smoke. Ask her about the politics. Give her a picture of the kid. Might budge her memories. Talk to other people there as well. There were a few mooching about. Sweet-talk 'em. They mostly speak English. If they don't or won't, ask ever so nicely about their immigration status." Maybe it was the Asantis. It didn’t hurt to ask again.  
"Right, guv," said Francis.  
"Meanwhile," Evans said, "DS Patel, DC Henshaw, DC Strutt - get on a house to house of the villages around the school."  
"Ma'am," a lot less enthusiastically.  
"I don't think they will have taken him far. We have - " she pointed to a wall map - "a farm here, at Bear Green, a village down the B4110 called Merstham, and this lot around the River Queale: Queale Major and Queale St Anthony."  
"Eat three Queales," Francis said. "I'll get me coat." He and Anna Carver - one of the unit's smarter young constables, and one who was wasted sitting in the office all day, in Evans's opinion - set off.

No sooner had the two teams gone their merry ways than Evans heard the most godawful racket from the outer office. A raised female voice, and one - no, two - male voices trying to placate it. Then the door to the incident room flew open.  
The figure in the doorway was nearly as tall as the lintel, allowing for her stack of red-dyed black hair. She had a round brown face with shrewd eyes, a straight nose and full lips. The body, dressed in an ochre dress with a black-and-gold patterned shawl over her shoulders, was not only fat but big, powerful, and she walked slowly into the incident room. There were two men with her: both brown-skinned men, in Western dress, but they didn't count for much compared with the woman who now was scant metres away from DI Evans.  
Evans looked at her, about to demand what the bloody hell she thought she was doing, this fighting with realisation who she was looking at.  
"I am the Queen," said Queen Hanaruka Lamotte Adruga Yeshi Idje Majapura.  
Evans wondered if she was expected to bow, but decided she was fucked if she was going to. She would be polite and respectful; but she always was with civilians, unless they'd been really naughty.  
"Ma'am," she said. "You came in person. I wasn't expecting you."  
"Quite," said the Queen. "They found me a seat or two in First Class. This is my Consort, Doctor Albert Tallu - "  
"Pleased to meet you," said Tallu, the rather corpulent civilian, who nonetheless looked a decent man, if Evans could tell anything from his face. He did actually seem to care. It was his son who was missing, after all. The others were along for the ride.  
"We'll find your son," said Evans. "Our investigation is proceeding at this moment."  
" - And this," said the Queen as though no other conversation had passed, "is my chief of police, Colonel Abdou. He will need an interpreter, he does not speak English."  
"Enchanté, madame," said the Colonel, though his voice and his body language suggested anything but. And you, your Maj, have just assumed I don't speak French, haven't you? Though I expect you'll be speaking together in Ako. Colonel Abdou was about the same age and height - one-seventy to one-eighty, late forties or fifty - as Tallu, but there the resemblance ended. He was thin, piggy-eyed, suspicious-faced, and resembled nothing so much as an African Heydrich. I suspect he lives down to the copybook view of a chief of police with the rank of Colonel, thumb screws and all.  
"Now," the Queen said, ensconced in a large chair in the comfortable interview room, "what have you done so far?" There was an uncomfortable interview room for suspects but there was no point in making witnesses and victims feel like they were criminals themselves; thus the armchairs, magazines, coffee machine, pictures on the walls, blue and green patterned carpet and oatmeal walls. The Queen had accepted herbal tea, refusing caffeine of any kind. Tallu had a cup of tea and was helping himself to a plate of biscuits. Abdou sat with a glass of water and stared, while the interpreter sat by him waiting to interpret. DC 'Charlie' Pearce sat in another armchair, listening intently.  
"We are conducting a house search," Evans said, thinking, it's me that's supposed to be interviewing you, not the other way about. "And we need information on any opponents of the regime, people who might have political reasons to seize Prince Samuel."  
"You think it is political?" the Queen said. "My opponents - " she made an unpleasant noise and drew her hand across her throat.  
"Especially the Asanti," Evans said. "We understand that some of them are - well, dissatisfied."  
"Asanti," the Queen said, pronouncing it asontee as though it were a French word. "They are dissatisfied, are they? Puis-je dire … let me say, the Asanti are criminels. I am dissatisfied with them. I am dissatisfied that they are not all in ze jail."  
"But ma'am," Evans went on, "don't you think there might be elements hostile to you, living here? Who might do such a thing?"  
"It is possible," the Queen replied.   
“I think it's more than likely,” said the boy's father. “I mean, people make enemies. Not all are as forgiving as we are.”  
''You see why I keep him on as a confidant,'' said the Queen in that heavy French accent. ''He is good at conciliation.'' Out of the corner of Evans' ear, that droning interpretation from the blond at Abdou's elbow.  
"But there is nobody particularly against us," said Tallu. "We do not have such strong political enemies - they would have shown their hand in Alako itself, surely? And I don't think the Asanti are that organised."  
Evans decided to try a different tack, while still wondering about the political elements. It was likely they would organise abroad, she thought. Anyone from the Khmer Rouge to the Russian Communists in 1917 had organised outside.  
''Did your son,'' she said, ''have any special interests? Anything he knew specifically that might have made someone want to .... take him?"  
And that you know about, Evans thought. I think you're a good father but who know what he might do once he arrived in England?  
"No," said Dr Tallu. "He is more interested in drawing and painting. And girls of course."  
"Did he have a special girlfriend?"  
Unfortunately Tallu seized on it the wrong way.  
"Why do you say 'did'?" There was real panic in the voice - panic she worked hard to dispel.  
"I mean in Alako. Was there anyone special there?"  
"There's a girl called Lucine," the Queen said. "Silly child, but amusing."  
"She believes in all this weird nonsense," Tallu said. "Flying saucers, living dinosaurs, this mysterious manuscript they discovered in the port..."  
"Oh," said Evans. "What's that?"  
"She's full of it," the Queen said. "Strange writing nobody understands, star maps ... says Sam wrote to her saying one of his teachers knows about it as well. Man name of Chandler."  
"Chandler," said Evans. "I've spoken to him. Pearce, get on to Chandler, soon as we finish here, ask him to come in."  
"Right, guv."  
It was worth a try. Nut rockers were always good for working outside the bounds of law - not so much criminals as scofflaws, those who saw no point in obeying laws they found inconvenient. Sometimes they'd not even think that what they were doing was illegal. It was almost a shame to bring them in, in some cases. They were like the fellow she'd once pulled for kerbcrawling, who wasn't married, wasn't cheating on anyone, just, so he said, getting what most people got for free and he had to pay for.  
She'd cautioned him and let him go. Shooting fish in a barrel was never Cordelia's style. Chandler though seemed, from what she remembered, different. A lot harder. Not a victim, not at all.


	3. Chapter 3

"Hamble was always my favourite," Chandler said. The atmosphere was warm and the girl with him mysterious and Asiatic. "He was weird. I used to fantasise that in the night he'd climb out of his box, go over and pick out one of the other toys at random, and give it a damn good thrashing."  
They were in the Cavalieri, a restaurant on Moreford's Market Square and looking out into the Square itself. Groups of young people drifted about, the occasional fat young mother pushed a pram containing a Burberry-clad Shanice or Beckham.  
The girl smiled. Chandler laughed warmly. The band struck up another song.  
"You haven't a clue what I'm on about, have you?" Chandler said, feeling slightly strange. A few years ago he could have put it down to being drunk, but not nowadays. Suzy smiled and poured him another glass of apple juice.

When they got back to his house, she turned and kissed him, then stood back and reached up to her back, and unzipped. The long blue dress slipped in a rustle to the floor, revealing the body he'd dreamed about: tall and gym-trained, in the most minimal bikini he'd ever seen, just enough to cover her nipples and her shaved slit. The bikini top followed, revealing a fine pair of breasts, tipped with coral-pink nipples. She tossed long ink-black hair, smiled again and fell to her knees.  
Chandler felt his heart racing as his zip came down, his belt slipped through the clasp, and the girl pulled down his trousers and pants. He stroked her hair, and brought a finger round to caress her cheek. She took his penis in her hand and slipped the head into her mouth as though she'd been smoking a cigar.   
"Christ, Suzy," he said. He was being a bit slow to respond. The strange feeling was increasing regularly. It was as well they'd come and gone by taxi. He suspected that if he came, she'd be gone. She looked up at him and licked the glans like it was an icecream. Never mind Hamble, he'd fantasised about bringing Suzy home and thrashing about with her like a couple of frogs on his bed, not having her give him an unsuccessful blowjob like a ten-quid Kings Cross whore in his living room.  
Stop thinking, he told himself. He was half-erect, but felt so tired.  
He looked down at her and she met his gaze with a look that might have been trusting or might not.  
"No good?" she asked, rocking back on her heels and then standing up. She put a hand on his shoulder and used the other to masturbate him. There was some response. He reached for her breasts and rubbed them, using his thumbs to caress the nipples. She smiled. A tall, smiling, slightly cross-eyed Chinese girl, naked but for a cache-sexe, was indeed a lovely sight, Chandler thought.  
Then it went completely. Chandler's head began spinning and he stood away from the girl, who stopped trying to milk him and looked concerned.  
"I don't feel well," he said. "I think you'd better …"   
"What?" Suzy said, looking less than pleased.   
"Get dressed and go," he said. "Please. I'll call you some other time." He pulled his trousers up and zipped.  
There was a noise from the front door. Chandler crouched, head still spinning badly, and saw his peripheral vision contract. The doorbell rang three times. Something thumped against the door. He looked at the door - it was like looking through a cardboard tunnel - and said,  
"Who's that?"  
The girl Suzy, already zipping up her dress, said,  
"I don't know." She seemed hesitant - looking at the door herself, trying to hold back but compelled by something stronger than her to go to the front door.  
"So they were supposed to come through the back?" he asked. "Come on." He seized her by the hand. "You're coming with me." The girl shook him off, tripped him up, and gave him an accidental-looking punch in the ribs. He fell messily to the ground. Self-defence, he thought, well, yes.  
"It was the drink," he said, looking up at her, "wasn't it?"  
Suzy went to the front door in two strides. I knew it, Chandler thought. The door flew open. She's in on this. Two large men fell over each other to get inside, brushing past Suzy, or whatever her name was.  
Chandler by this point wasn't hanging around to watch. He was halfway down the living room, running through the kitchen. He slammed open the back door and ran faster than he would have believed possible down the path, feet crunching on the gravel. The door to the back alley was notoriously stiff to open, but Chandler had developed the knack rather than ever getting it fixed. Feet crunched towards him at a run. Chandler shoved the gate open, slipped through and slammed it behind him as the first of the thugs reached it. He was in the Richmond Road once more, watching the mouth of the alley for his assailants.  
No mobile phone, he realised, but his wallet was in his trousers. He went to a telephone box.

"I wasn't expecting to see you under these circumstances," DI Evans said. "Now, you say there was a girl and two men. What was your relationship to the girl?"  
"She's an escort," Chandler said. "I was paying her for her company."  
"I see," said Evans. "And would this involved sexual favours?"  
"If she chooses," said Chandler. It was the standard line. Payment is for the young lady's company. Consensual sex between adults is no offence.  
"And did she choose?" Evans asked.  
"Well, yes," said Chandler. "Though we didn't actually have sex because I felt ill. Look, I think she put something in my drink. Ro-bo-lo or whatever it's called."  
"Rohypnol, guv," said DC Pearce. "The so-called Date Rape Drug. It doesn't make you groggy, though. It just puts you out, like a light, so you have no idea anything's been done to you. Couldn't just have got you drunk, sir, could she?" Pearce had been detailed to have a word with Chandler and now here was the gentleman himself, in a distressed condition, and not a bit ashamed of having been nearly Shanghaied by a call-girl. They'd accompanied him home but there was no sign of the girl nor the two men. There was just a mess. As soon as he'd got inside, Chandler had gone straight for an antique bureau that had been forced open, its drawers smashed and books and papers strewn on the ground. Only when he'd examind that debris did he look around more generally.  
"I don't drink," Chandler said. "Could have been an MF - a Mickey Finn - I suppose. You know, somebody put something in my drink, etcetera."  
"I see," said Evans. "Now, Mr Chandler, did you recognise either of the men?"  
"Well, only generically," Chandler said. "From just about any gangster movie. They were heavies. White guys, short hair. Black jeans and sweaters, something like that. I didn't get much of a look."  
"So," Pearce said, "the girl drugs you and the guys come in to burgle the joint?" He looked puzzled.  
"Possibly," said Chandler. "But I think this was more than that. They had something in mind."  
"And you have no idea why this might be," Evans stated.  
"I didn't say that," Chandler said. "But I'm not at my best at the moment."  
He looked around. The hifi was still there; but then it would be. They'd been after something else.  
Pearce was nuzzling through the ravaged contents of the living room and occasionally making little grunts of surprise. Once he silently held up a magazine to show Evans: Bare Knuckle Babes.  
"You say the woman was Chinese, sir?" Evans said.   
"Yes, she called herself Suzy."  
"Wong," said Pearce. "The World of Suzy Wong. Good film, that."  
"Any further description you can help us with?" said Evans.  
"Tall, about one-seventy five..."  
"Pounds?"  
"Eh? No, centimetres. Long black hair, athletic build, slight squint. Age about thirty, though she said she was twenty-three. She was wearing a blue dress. Shiny blue, like satin."  
"And how did you arrange to meet her?"  
"Through an agency. Asia Pearls. I've used them before, they've been allright."  
"So they could have a rogue operator," Evans agreed. "But you make it sound like they were after something in particular." She leaned forwards.  
"What do you think that was, Mr Chandler?"  
"Okay," he said, echoing the Inspector's posture.  
"This." He went to the debris of the sideboard, reached behind it, and something clicked. Chandler slid open a panel in the wall and drew out a pale brown book, apparently bound in leather and about the height and width of a tabloid newspaper. He handed it to Evans, who opened it gingerly, appreciating the age and probable fraglity of the thing. As she looked at the first page a look of puzzlement crept over her face, followed by some distaste as she looked at later pages. That it was old was not in doubt; nor that it was written in a strange script that resembled Greek, from what Evans could tell, and apparently all in one enormously long word on each page. Some pages had pictures on them, and some of the pictures were quite disturbing: worms, insectile humanoid creatures, and naked humans among them. Some of the humans were doing rude things with one another and with the aliens. In one scene, two nude and impressively-built human women shared the affections of one of the wormlike creatures. One end each.  
"What's this?" Pearce said, reading over his guv'nor's shoulder. "Alien porn?"  
"I think," Chandler said, "it's a translation, or part of one. Have either of you ever heard of the Ukolo Manuscript?"   
They hadn't, though 'Ukolo' rang a bell with Cordelia Evans.  
"It was written," Chandler explained, "in an unknown script and language something over a thousand years ago. It shows accurate star maps, particularly of a cluster called the Hyades. There's been a lot more interest lately since a planet was discovered last year, orbiting one of the stars - not visible except with an immensely powerful telescope.  
"The same planet is described in a map in the Ukolo Manuscript, accurate down to the planet's size and rotation."  
"Doesn't bear thinking about," said Pearce, a solid copper whose idea of imaginative sex was a dirty weekend in Edinburgh. His nickname of 'Charlie', after the Victorian villain Charlie Peace, was about as unusual as he got.  
"That," said Evans. "That's what the Queen was talking about. Wasn't it?"  
"The Queen?" Chandler said, thinking he'd been catapulted into a parallel world stagemanaged by David Icke.  
"The Queen of Alako," Evans said. "She turned up in person."  
Chandler chuckled.  
"Did she now," he said. "I bet that was fun for you all. And she was talking about the manuscript?"  
"She said," Evans replied, "among other things that Samuel's girlfriend knew about this ancient manuscript or whatever. As you seem to yourself."  
"I've studied it at length," said Chandler, "and then I came by that book. It's in some kind of dialect of Attic Greek, possibly written down by someone who didn't actually speak the language. The pictures and text blocks correspond exactly to the Ukolo text.  
"I've been able to understand a fair bit of it. Yes, it could be a hoax; but if it is, it's a very old one.  
"I had a section of the paper, ink and binding analysed. The ink is a vegetable ink as used in the Middle Ages. The paper is at least five hundred years old. And the cover: it's the same age, and it's human skin."  
"Ugh," Evans exclaimed and put the book on the table in front of her.  
"Precisely," Chandler said. "And I bet you thought that kind of stuff started with Ilse Koch. Lampshades and all that. Nope. I couldn't imagine where or whom this came from.  
"So that," he said, "is probably what they were after. That and any notes on it they could find, but there aren't any."  
"Meanwhile," Chandler concluded, "are you going to find the people who tried to steal it?"  
"We'll find them," Pearce said. "Don't you worry."  
Don't you worry, DI Evans thought, though plainly it wasn't impossible that the gang would come back. The one who, it seemed, ought to be worrying was poor young Prince Samuel, wherever he was. If there was a connection with this recent blag, and there almost certainly had to be, then Sam was dealing with some ripe old nutcases. And who could tell what nutcases might do? The old equations didn't work on them.

The policeman who dealt with the bruised and bleeding woman who staggered into Bayswater Police Station at first thought she was a heroin addict. She certainly seemed that way, constantly crying, wringing her hands; but it became clear after a while that she had been attacked. Besides, she didn't look like a smackhead; not ravaged enough, she had all her teeth, and junkies don't usually wear blue satin dresses that must have cost several hundred pounds from an exclusive West End boutique.  
Wrapped in a warm dressing-gown, sipping hot tea, and attended to by a policewoman, her story came out bit by bit. Her name was Chi-Yien, and she worked as an escort girl under the name of Suzy.  
She had been sent by the Agency she worked for to be the evening's companion for one of their repeat clients, a gentleman who from time to time requested an East Asian lady for paid company, though he hadn't requested Chi-Yien / Suzy before. After she had taken on the job, however, she was assaulted on the way out of her flat, and forced back in.  
"Two of them grabbed me," she said. "Forced me to lie down. I thought they were going to rape me. But that wasn't it. There was a weird smell in the room, I remember that clearly. Then it went very strange."  
Something was done to her; something she could only vaguely remember, but which seemed to involve wings, and flapping demons. For a while she believed her world had been invaded by the demons of her Chinese childhood, ugly grinning black ghosts with red mouths. Creatures that the Chinese rulers had decreed didn't exist, but every grandmother knew they did and every child learned that as well as school-lessons. She had also seen red horned creatures which although they looked something like people, did not move like people, as though their arms and legs had been sewn on backwards, and they also looked like insects.  
"I thought I was in hell," she said. "And then they tell me, go and see your client, but give him this. And they give me a tube of something. To put in his drink. Why do I obey? I don't want to hurt this man. But I must obey. I have seen the creatures, the red ones, and heard them screaming. I knew they would kill me if I disobeyed. They may still kill me."  
"And did you?" the policewoman asked gently, stroking the woman's long black hair.  
"Yes, I did. And then when I was in his house, I let in the men who made me do it. I also punched my client to keep him on the floor and stop him from fighting the men who took me."  
"Then they took me back to London, and beat me up, and left me in a pile of rubbish. Like I was rubbish myself." She started to cry again, shaking her head and sobbing.  
"Would you be able to recognise them," the policewoman asked, "if you saw them again?"  
"Yes, of course," Chi-Yien replied. "It is not true that you all look the same to us." She smiled.  
"Am I in trouble?" she asked.  
"I hope not," the policewoman said. "We’ll get the guys who did this. Promise."

***

Luke Francis and Anna Carver parked the patrol car in a Hackney street and looked around them warily.  
"We've been in worse places, guv," Carver said.  
"Can't think when," Francis replied. "I must be getting soft in me old age." Don't they care? He thought. It wasn't the first time he'd thought that the only thing he had in common with the populations of places like this was the colour of his skin. It had been so hard to avoid falling back into the poverty, the unthinkingness. He'd grown up in Brixton, not a bad place for a black youth to hang out, certainly better than a lot of places and of course the Francis clan was ubiquitous. Joining the police in the mid-1990s he found there was not only residual racism from the older white officers who treated the police as a white men's club and enforced the canteen culture as far as it would go, but also from black civilians who sucked their teeth and muttered words like 'coconut' - black outside, white inside.  
Luke Francis didn’t feel white inside, but he didn't see why black should mean 'indigent and bone fucking idle', as he once put it, any more than white necessarily meant lardy, lager-drinking and belligerent. In Anna Carver's case, for example, it meant redhaired, snubnosed and downright cheeky.  
Things had got better since, though he didn't think the investigation of police racism after the murder of architecture student Stephen Lawrence, killed - allegedly - by white yobs at a bus stop in Eltham, did that much good. It was 'allegedly' because nobody had yet been brought to book for the crime; and the investigation took place not because it was a crime that had shocked the nation, but because it hadn't. There seemed no anger in the community at large, and the black community seemed to turn inwards on its own anger as police assumed it was a drug-related killing even though young Lawrence had no more dealings with drugs than any young person growing up in South London.   
The results of the investigation - that the police were instituationally racist, didn't help, in Francis's mind. What the fuck are we going to do about it? He said. Still, he'd found a new younger generation of police had a far less entrenched attitude, and he should be able to work his way up.  
As his uncle Oliver, who to this day ran the barber's shop on Acre Lane that he'd started in the 1960s, once told him,  
"Use the Force, Luke."  
It might have gone very differently, he thought, looking at the litter-strewn street and the mooching hooded individuals, shop windows boarded up when they weren't pound shops or advertising cheap calls to India and Africa with gaudy smiling faces. Luke had certainly done his share of dodgy behaviour, running for minor drug dealers and so on. He got into boxing at the local gym, and gradually got straightened out, not least by the gym's owner, 'Pop' Jordan, a first-generation Jamaican immigrant, who'd boxed like a fury in his own youth. Even 'Pop' was surprised when Luke announced one day that he'd applied to join the Police.  
"Well, well," Pop said, "never thought I'd see the day."  
"But you don't think it's a bad idea?"  
"No, no, man," Pop replied. "You go ahead. You see me disrespecting you? No. Just one thing -"  
"Pop?"  
"You keep coming here. Keep it up."  
He had for the first year or two, but although he did drop in to see Pop now and again, Brixton was a bit of a haul from Moreford where he had access to good sports facilities. Even so, the old guy had had the right influence on him; it could have gone so differently, especially now that guns were the item du jour in Haringey and Notting Hill, but it hadn't. Now he lived in a flat not far from the river, admittedly largely paid for by his solicitor girlfriend ... Roslyn was white, which had made some people suck their teeth, but Francis ignored them apart from one incident at a party, when they descended the stairs from bedroom to living room, with Roslyn in a state of advanced dishevelment, and Luke drunkenly announced,  
"I'm a black man and I just fucked a white girl." Only he didn't say 'black man.' It was worth it for the moment of stunned silence as the politically correct elements tried to work out how to react to the Bad Word, while weighing up that it was a black person who said it and they're allowed to. Some people just started laughing and one said,  
"Good for you, brother," and after that it seemed allright again.  
Francis and Carver had found the door marked "Asanti Social Center."  
"Can't spell," Carver said. "Guv."  
"Never mind," Francis said. "Shall we pay 'em a visit?"

They hadn't expected quite the level of anger, nor of Communism. Portraits of Marx, Lenin and Che hung on the walls. Mrs Falolo was an articulate young thirty-something. She was thin, wiry, and had a sharp, longnosed, very dark face.   
"We're poor," she said. "That's why some of our people may have to steal. What for you come sniffing round, you don' give us no money..."  
"We're just inquiring, madam, whether you know of any groups of people among the Asanti her who might want to harm the Alako."  
"Harm!" the woman exclaimed. "They do nothing but harm. Their queen sent us into exile. We are like the Jews of Africa."  
"Falashas?" Francis asked.  
"Dirty buggers," said Carver. "Arrest them, I would. Indecent exposure."  
"Names, madam," Francis went on, ignoring the Constable. "Can you give us some names?"  
"No," Falolo said.  
"Shame," said Francis. "Cos I'm sure I could do some digging for myself. You know, the Home Office ... Immigration ... are you sure everyone's papers are in order, Mrs Falolo?"  
"You bastard," Falolo said.  
"Now now," said Francis. "Names?"  
"There are some people," Falolo said.  
"Names? Place?"  
"There are many names," she said. "But a house ... in Shepherds Bush."  
"Whereabouts?"  
"Uxbridge Road," she sighed. "Next to the White Horse pub. A shop called Vanity Fabrics."  
"Thank you, madam," Francis said. As they left he heard her spout a torrent of invective that, mostly in an African tongue, included the English phrase 'Fascist pigs.'  
Francis looked inside again.  
"If I catch you being Twi," he said in a syrupy voice, "I'll knot your arms behind your head. Comprenez? Now shut it!" Mrs Falolo screamed like a banshee and the police withdrew.

"Shepherds Bush it is, then, guv," Carver said.  
"Right," said Francis. "I think that went rather well."  
"What was all that about flashers?" Carver asked, pulling out into the street and narrowly avoiding a wheeleying boy on a bicycle.   
"Falashas, Anna," Francis said. "Ethiopian Jews. They really are the Lost Tribe of Israel. Not these fellows at all."  
"Oh," said Carver. "I see." She spotted a sign saying "The West" and followed it gratefully.  
Francis was already on the radio.  
"Get me all the information you have about Vanity Fabrics, Uxbridge Road, Shepherds Bush. Address, who lives there, whether they ever take a bath, you know."  
They didn't have to go far before he was beeped.  
"It's 33a Uxbridge Road, W12," was the reply. "Owner is a Mr Abdullah. Location is believed to have been used as a crack house."  
"Naughty Abdullah," said Francis. "Wait till Allah finds out. Well, that's good news anyway. We can always go in acting on information received. Thanks. Out."  
"We got a W?" Carver asked.  
"We will have," Francis said, and got back on the radio. They could always produce a search warrant later if queried.  
"May need armed support," he was saying. "Suspected gang staying above 33a Uxbridge Road. Reason to believe they are involved with kidnap of Prince Samuel of Alako."  
"Armed?" Carver said.  
"Well, what would you suggest?" Francis asked. "If they're anything like that harpy back there we'll need an elephant gun."  
"Surely Serious Crime Squad time in that case?" Carver asked.  
"I can call in favours from time to time," Francis replied, idly watching people pass by on a pedestrian crossing. "This is our case, Anna. The last thing I want is the SCS or the Sweeney getting their hands on it."

Much of the northern part of the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham resembles an immense concrete hydra, spewing out roads and infested with cars across an area in parts so sparsely inhabited that it scarcely seems to matter. Wormwood Scrubs, which if the area were more salubrious might be renowned as a place of leisure, is best known for its prison; and amusingly - and it's about all that is amusing around there - one of the sidestreets nearby is known as Henchman Street. Where the henchmen live, obviously. Further south where the BBC Television Centre lies islanded like a very surprised spaceship, is the White City estate, remarkable surely for its name being hated by everybody - it's named after the White City exhibition centre that used to lie here, a fantastical folly designed by Imre Kiralfy for the delectation of the Empire in the early 20th century. For a long time one element of this extravaganzum remained; a simple white arch, stripped of its ornament, leading to warehouses at first floor level, between a pub (the Mail Coach) and a sports shop, at the northern side of Shepherds Bush Green. This is gone now, and gone is the Mail Coach where they used to serve tasty Sunday lunches for a fiver; a pub full of railway bric-a-brac because the Central Line depot was just behind it; where there was a late licence on Saturdays and although they were Irish they never failed to celebrate Burns Night with a free supper of haggis, neeps and tatties to go with your wee dram. Gone too is the old frontage to Wood Lane station, derelict for decades but this at least has now been put into store and will be reassembled by the London Transport Museum. Walking around the borough so much 'was there', like the White City dogtrack; gone, all gone. The architectural and indeed the social history of the area is one of dereliction, sorrow and anger. Many of the long - term residents have gone, too; left for places where there is a sense of community, not constant fluence, coming and going, making money and then fucking off somewhere else.  
This too has been one of the desolate places of the Earth. The mage of West London, James Sartis, once declared that Hammersmith Broadway was the axis mundi, the centre of the world and for this reason it attracted bad karma, especially in the form of traffic; even once you're south of Shepherds Bush you are within the roaring ambit of the A4, the main road west, where 200,000 people a day drive through; that's more people than actually live in the borough itself. To live here is to be squeezed between road and road, or road and river, and there is no denying the riverside area is pretty, with its five pubs between the ornate Hammersmith Bridge (William Morris, a local resident for many years, hated it, but in this case he's on his own) and Chiswick. Yet the very fate of Hammersmith conspired against it and the river and King Street, the town's brawling main thoroughfare, are forever - unless a miracle or a disaster intervenes - cut off from one another. Sartis called the A4 the Duat, the Egyptian river of death, a sewer of …well, of the things that you find in a sewer, and only the hardy soul can fly over it. Talking of flyovers, that one goes over central Hammersmith and does something to alleviate the circambulatory nightmare of the axis. From the flyover you can look down - if you have the time - onto an older road pattern, and the Hammersmith Apollo, once the Gaumont and then the Hammersmith Odeon, that mecca of rock and soul music through the decades; Motorhead named one of their albums "No Sleep Till Hammersmith".  
Eastwards of that is another, this time long-gone rock legend: the Red Cow, where the Stranglers and Elvis Costello cut their teeth on proper audiences. It's now a 1980s building housing a pub/restaurant called Latymers, but the landlord, Ken Maguire, at least knows about the history of his pub and has regular music sessions there.   
Crossing Hammersmith Road from there, you can walk past the office block where the King's Theatre used to stand, and up Rowan Road where the poet Leigh Hunt (who wrote "Abou Ben Adhem" and "Jenny Kissed Me") used to live - he moved in there because it was cheap and he didn't have much money; poetry never really pays, and there's more to it than swanning about Italy in a big shirt. Then you come to Brook Green and St Paul's Girls' School, where surely the ghost of Gustav Holst, formerly music master there, is still humming a tune beneath the trees. Turn left, past the tennis courts and the Queen's Head, and you come to Shepherds Bush Road. And to the northern end of that, past the Brook Green Hotel, the Richmond and the Bush, is Shepherds Bush Green, and the Uxbridge Road, formerly a carriage road to the west, the northern abutment of Shepherds Bush Market, and the haunt of many an Irish person, though now the Irish complain that no young Irish are coming into the area to take over from the older, who are being left to live and die here. The Irish community is going the way of the English; all moving out. The lovely Audrey O'Donoghue, as fair a maid as ever came from Erin's isle, married and moved to the suburbs; and she wasn't the only one.  
Pat Moynihan thought about this not at all, or a little, or a lot, as he sat at the bar of the White Horse with a pint of Guinness; his third of the day. Pat was an Irishman of the old school; to see his red face and thatch of greywhite hair you wouldn't mistake him for any other than a son of the Auld Sod, and a son of an auld sod he was indeed, if he was sufficiently oiled and with the alcoholic beverages taken to admit to it. Seumas Moynihan had not been a kind taskmaster and indeed was most of the reason why Pat was now in London rather than in Ireland. The old beggar was still alive and Pat didn't like the idea of running into him when he went home. The Ma however was in her grave many a long year, and probably, Pat thought, he knew why. She'd produced six children - Bridie, Maureen, Nuala, Sean, Emer and the only other boy, Pat, and then died.   
More to Pat's consternation these days was the way the community seemed to be falling apart; so he was thinking about it, so there. Whereas ten years ago he'd have known a dozen faces between here and his flat in a street to the north side of Uxbridge Road (round the back from the petrol station, and near the Swakeley Arms, now O'Donoghue's, and only possibly named after sweet Audrey), now there was only him and Peter Keegan, and Peter Keegan was hardly saying a word except to dispense the occasional racing tip with which he or Pat would head up the street the two doorways away from the White Horse to Bob the Bookie, and say,  
"Bob, I am wishing to place some money on An American Trio in the 2.45 at Doncaster," and just so, he would put that fiver down and like as not the nag would come in the pretty way and he would be none the better off. But just occasionally the money would come straight and the horse would gallop like Finn MacCool's steed herself and blur past the winning post - the item, not the diabolical pub over in Acton - and just for once Irish eyes really would be smiling and some of the girls, who had the bloom of youth on them like a rose, would smile and even kiss the lucky man, for he remembered what the kiss of a beautiful woman is like, and what it's like when she says yes I will yes and lays herself down ever so and even if you had only the blanket for your sky or is that the other way about and only your dreams to lay at her feet still she says yes I will yes yes. Yes.  
Pat watched mildly out of the window and sipped at his stout. He wasn't bitter. Now, what was this? Some excitement! A police car had pulled up alongside the public house, and out of it sprang two of the polis, a black fellow and a white girl. Not too uncomely, the girl, either, for a Garda. Although the official view was what the hell do those gobshites want in our public house where they won't probably even buy a drink, in truth Pat would have liked it if the police had come in. It would have been something to do, something to talk about. None of the old gang, he thought again; not even his near namesake Paddy Moynihan, councillor and counsellor, nor Mona Kelly, who used to be such fun to be with but had cleaned up her act to such an extent that she was almost frightening. The polis ran past and Pat padded to the door to watch.  
"They've gone in next door," said a thin redhaired youth, probably one of the O'Connell lads if he wasn't mistaken. "Into the crack house."  
"Oh aye," said Pat. "They're going for the crack then." He beamed at the youth. "I'll get me coat." He drank further. Another squad car drew up opposite and some really quite aggressive-looking policemen bundled out of it and took up station in front of the building.  
"Somebody not paid the gas bill?" Pat wondered.

The staircase that led up above number 33 was rickety and narrow, and Luke Francis wondered if it would take their weight. It did; and at the top of the stairs, a small landing led to one door. They paused for a moment in the smell of dust and dirt and a peculiar chemical smell. Then they went in. Francis put his shoulder to the door and shoved, and the door flew open.  
At first he thought the place had been used as a charnel. It was red everywhere; red walls, red furniture, red floor. In that red, two people were squatting, naked, sharing something red between them. They looked up and one of them stood up, reached for something on a side table.  
Covering the distance between himself and the man in a few seconds, Luke bodyslammed into him and knocked him back onto the floor. Anna was in hot pursuit of the other one who'd made it to the window and was trying to climb out. She wrestled him back into the room, got his hand up behind him in the classic 'come-along' position. Luke's captive squirmed up from under him and tried to get to the front door, but Luke grabbed him, bore his naked body down again and got him face down on the carpet.  
"Get your trousers on," Luke Francis said. "You're nicked."

"Nobody else here, guv," Anna said, after an exhaustive search of what amounted to a room and a toilet. The two suspects had been allowed to dress - jeans, dirty T-shirts - and then been handcuffed. They were both brown-skinned, quite solidly built, one with bushy hair, the other - the one Francis had borne down - with a shaven head.  
"Jees," Anna went on, "what a toilet!"   
And that was just the flat itself. The toilet was the toilet of nightmare. It had plainly been blocked repeatedly and never cleaned. Something that might have been a dead rat or something worse lay alongside the overflowing bowl. Anna marched back into the living room, crouched down, and delivered a hard slap to the face of the bushy-haired captive. In the grumbling near-silence of the room it sounded like a gunshot.  
"That's for being a dirty cunt," she said.   
"Funny how they turned on each other, isn't it," Luke Francis remarked amiably.  
"Hilarious," Anna said. "I mean, they might easily start fighting each other again. Come on, you slag, let's get you down the station." As she lifted the prisoner to his feet, he drew back his head and pursed his lips. Anna knew what someone about to spit looked like. In a second he was wheezing as she'd punched him in the stomach. Vomit dribbled from the corner of his mouth.  
"Got a towel?" she asked. "I suppose I shouldn't ask around here. Jees, you could get diseases from this place, and the people in it. Don't look like bloody terrorists, though, do they?"  
"No," Francis said, standing in the middle of the room. The place was all but empty, just a couple of sticks of furniture and that nightmarish red décor, which viewed with the eyes of reason proved to be because the lampshade had been covered in red paper. He took off the lampshade and the place was no prettier, dingy wallpaper peeling away with damp in places, beige carpet stained with things he'd rather not think about. There were odd pictures scrawled on the walls; circles and spirals and some very odd-looking creatures, and a lot of what was probably writing in some foreign script, and among it something that looked like Latin: LIBERATE TUTAME EX FERIS.  
A dead moth fell out of the lampshade and landed on his shoe. He shook it off.   
"No names?" Francis asked with that same deadly amiable tone he'd used before. "Well, your immigration papers can't be in order, can they? Papers," he enunciated.  
"Fucking traitor," said the shaven-headed man. The accent sounded French.  
"Pardon me," said Francis. "I didn't quite hear that. My ears - " he clouted the man's ear for emphasis - "aren't very good."  
"You are African," the man said. "Yet you work for the British."  
"Listen, slag," Francis said, leaning close enough to smell the man's rancid breath. "I'm Black, thanks for noticing. But I am also British, not that that means shit to you. What means shit to me is that you and your bumchum here have a nice little factory going, don't you? Selling it to schoolkids. Could be your own kids, could be mine. Now, where are the others?"  
"What others?" the man sneered.  
"The others," Francis said. "The Asanti gang. You're Asanti, aren't you?"  
"Non," the man said. "We are Ako. We hate the Asanti. They are scum."  
Francis stood up and looked at Anna Carver, shook his head sadly.  
"That bloody woman," he said. "Of course she'd do something like this. Of course she would. Do you live here?"  
"Yes," the man said.  
"Names?"  
Silence.   
"Names!" Francis said. Reluctantly they gave them.  
"Jonathan Kilonge," said bushy-hair.  
"Simeon Oguno," said the bald one.  
"You're still dirty cunts," Anna told him. "I didn't used to believe men could live in such pigsties, but since I joined I've had to believe it."  
"You sink I need ze love of a good woman?" Kilonge sneered.  
"I think you need another smacking," Anna said.  
Francis flipped open his radio.  
"Fox to units," he said. "Stand down. Apprehended two suspects, unarmed, bringing them in."  
"Dunno about unarmed," Anna said, pointing to something on a side table; the item Oguno had gone for when they came in. "That's a fucking machine pistol."  
"Silly me," Francis said. "So it is. Uzi, normal calibre. Oh dear oh lor. You two really must be fond of Parkhurst."  
"Parkhurst?" Kilonge said.  
"It's a prison, Alphonse. Could be Brixton, I suppose. Or the Scrubs. Whichever it is, you'll be seeing a lot of it. 'Course, you'll tell us you don't know who that weapon belongs to, and you'd never seen it before, won't you?"  
"Yes," said Kilonge.  
"Then if you told me who it did belong to, that might help. Come on, sunshine, down the nick."  
"Shall we go back and pick up Mrs Falolo?" Carver asked.  
"Not right away," Francis said. "In fact, no. After all if there's a possibility she's harbouring terrorists … well, don't you think Alphonse and André here might know something about it? Do you, chaps?"  
"Do we what?" Kilonge said sullenly. "You speak too quickly."  
"Never mind now," Francis said. "We'll have plenty of time down the station."


	4. Chapter 4

I'd spent enough time in the little farmhouse that I knew very well the comings and goings of all the people about the farm. Vassily, Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, as I called them, the old boy who brought my food, and that was about it.  
Then things changed. I was sitting out the front with my notepad, sketching away … something which struck me as funny; they were giving me the ability to clearly depict the place I was being held in. Still, no matter. As I've said, I would have gone spare if I hadn't been able to draw. It was a warm day by the standards of an English Autumn; a temperature probably up towards twenty degrees.  
A figure approached from the road to the left; approaching slowly, pedalling a bicycle. When it was close, the rider stopped the bike, got off and leaned it against a tree.  
"Hi," she said, walking towards me. She was not much older than me, wore close-fitting jeans and a black sports bikini top with green piping. Her skin in the gap between jeans and top was pale, and her navel, in a smooth slightly curved stomach, had a bright shining stud. When I finally managed to look at her face I saw a pretty face, blue-eyed and straight-nosed, surrounded by a cascade of dark brown hair.  
"Hello," I said. "I'm Sam." I stood up and held out my hand. She took it and I felt a warm, soft grip.  
"I'm Terrie," she said. "You know my grandad."  
"I do?" I said. "Yes, if he's the … gentleman who brings my food."  
"That's him," she said. "Only he asked me to bring it today."  
"Isn't he well?" I asked.  
"He's fine," she said. "I think he had too many in the Lamb and Flag last night, that's all." She sat down beside me on the bench.  
"That's good," she said, "very good." She was leaning against me, a bare arm against my arm in the sleeve of my school shirt.  
"Sorry, am I crowding you?" she asked, feeling my tension. It was a good thing she also couldn't feel the erection that was already rising in my pants.  
"Not at all," I said. "I just … haven't had many visitors."  
"Poor you," she said.  
"And I suppose you can't tell me what this is all about?" I asked.  
"I don't know what 'this' is," she said. "I was just asked to take this food - " she gestured at the bag she'd placed on the ground - "to the boy at the farm. And that’s you."  
"Who by?"   
"My, aren't you full of questions?" She grinned and pushed me slightly. I pushed back. "By my grandad. I don't know who asked him. I've been told not to ask too much."  
"And where do you live?" I asked.  
"With my mum, in the village," she said. "Now enough questions. I'll let you get back to your drawing. I want the bag back afterwards, mind." She stood up.  
"Will you come back tomorrow?" I asked.  
"Sure," she said. "Later, Sam." She sauntered off to her bike. I watched her arse in those jeans and felt my erection grow miserably tight. She flung a long leg over the bike, waved and started pedalling.  
I couldn't paint the scene in front of me any more. Instead I began to sketch her as she rode off; a series of lines, her bike and her body, down the long avenue that led to her village, whatever the village was called. I could see, as plainly as if it had been in front of me, her pretty face and the soft V of her top where skin disappeared under fabric. My hips moved of their own accord, moving to their own pattern of copulation. I rubbed experimentally, and then had to rush for the outside lavatory, latch the door and unzip my trousers, before it was too late. A couple of handstrokes and white fluid spurted over the bowl.  
I still had no idea why I was being kept at the farm. It had been a week now and there was no communication from Vassily or either of the others; the old boy - Terrie's grandad - said nothing beyond the most vague pleasantries, and even Terrie hadn't been at all forthcoming. For all I knew it could be some weird reality TV setup, like The Truman Show, but I suspected not.  
Evening drew in, and as night was beginning to fall, a shape appeared flickering between the trees. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't wished for it to happen; but there she was. Terrie. I was sitting by my window by now and I let her in.  
"School's out," she said, sitting by me on the bed. She was wearing the same clothes she had been before, and smelled of some fresh scent.  
"School," I said. "I remember school."  
"Well, you're at school, aren't you?" she said. "Or are you excused? How old are you?"  
"Fifteen and a half," I said.  
"Well, I'm a year and a half older than you, then," Terrie said. "Never mind. Where are you from?"  
"Alako," I said. "that's in …"  
"West Africa," she completed for me. "Oops, I shouldn't finish people's sentences for them, sorry."  
"It's allright," I said. For some reason I couldn't tell her what had happened to me. It didn't seem real, as though I'd always been working on this farm, like some kind of southern slave on a plantation, given a new name and told to start again. My name is Toby? Yassuh, baas.  
"Do you have a girlfriend?" she asked. "Back in Africa?"  
"Sort of," I said. "Her name's Lucine."  
"Do you have a picture of her?"  
"No," I said.  
"Can't be much of a girlfriend," Terrie teased.  
"Well … " I said. "She's a bit of a damper. I think people want me to marry her. It'd be useful."   
"To them," Terrie said. "Not to you. How about in England. Do you have one here?"  
"No," I said, thinking of Afi, who wasn't my girlfriend, she had made that clear, though in her usual firm but gentle way.  
"And with Lucine," she said, "did you …"  
"Oh sure," I said.  
She smiled.  
"You mean you haven't," she said. She stood up and closed the blinds, then pulled her top off over her head. I couldn't stop staring. A pair of pale-skinned breasts, firm and pink-nippled. She slipped her jeans off and put them on the chair over her top. Her legs were long, strong, and she wore white lacy panties. She shook out her long ringleted hair so it fell over her bare shoulders.  
"Come on," she said. "Don't be shy." I fumbled with my zip but found her expert hands pulling it down and my trousers with it. "There's nothing to it," she said. She had my shirt off, and then my pants. My erection stood out painfully; I felt it was about to burst like a ripe fruit. Terrie looked at it and ran a finger along its curve. I nearly spurted there and then.  
Terrie pushed me back onto the bed. She slipped off her panties, to reveal a pink slit among a patch of fine black hairs. I just lay there, as she took my hands and put them to her breasts. She put her hands over mine and I felt the nipples swell. Then she knelt over me and guided my hand to her sex, teased a finger out and let me rub it against her. Finally when my hips were bucking and I could scarcely control myself any longer, she moved up over me and guided me up into her, closing her eyes and opening her mouth in a gasp. I felt myself slide into her, put my hands on her hips and felt her move on me. She rode up and down on me, then again, then I came.  
When she was finished we collapsed together on the bed, close together, giggling occasionally, talking quietly about this and that. I reflected that no matter what else was due to happen to me now, this had happened. It was an odd feeling.  
"Terrie," I said.  
"What?" she whispered.  
"Nothing," I said. "Just Terrie."  
"Sam," she replied. She chuckled warmly and hugged me. "I've just had sex with a fifteen-year-old …"  
"I've just had sex …"  
We lay together as the night fell outside. Eventually she must have got dressed and gone home, but when I next woke it was daylight and the birds were tweeting outside.

***

"You," DI Evans said to Chandler, "are not in trouble. Though you seem to attract it."  
He did, it was true; knowing he'd not actually been stupid with the girl Suzy, for how could he be expected to know that she was working for some kind of gang? He was expected to sit, perhaps, contrite and head bowed and make it up to his wife for going with a call girl. But that wasn't the case; that wasn't the case at all, not in his situation. Nobody told married men not to have sex with their wives, so why tell him not to have sex with tarts? Paula Chandler had gone three years ago, gone into rehab and then found herself a nice house with the divorce settlements. Chandler suspected that the man she'd now set up house with got called 'daddy' and went with the settlement, so to speak.   
Evans and Chandler were in the staff room at Jericho, drinking coffee, a very civilised setup if you didn't know there was a history of kidnap, burglary, assault and attempted theft behind it.  
"I want you to think, though," Evans said, "of any conversation you had with Sam that led you to suspect he might have been in danger."  
"Well, I thought there was a general danger of something like that happening," Chandler said. "But nothing specific. He did talk about the manuscript and I showed him the translation -"  
"You did?"  
"Yes," Chandler said.  
"At your house?"  
"No," the teacher replied. "That is very much against the rules. You know how the press these days like to conduct nonce-hunts. People mentoring wayward kids aren't even allowed to take them in their cars in case some uppity child invents a tale of perversion."  
"But Sam knows about the translation, that's the issue," Evans said. "And if there's a connection between the kidnappers and the people who tried to steal it, then we may have some kind of clue as to their motive."   
"Getting hold of the translation by getting at Sam?" Chandler asked. "In that case, why try to steal the translation as well? Perhaps the one only works with the other."   
"Meaning?" Evans asked.  
"Meaning they need Sam for something that's contained in the translation. They have the manuscript but need to check it against the translation to be sure. Sort of like going to the library to check your sources."   
"Okay," Evans said. "And how many people knew you had the translation in your house?"  
"Almost nobody," Chandler said. "I bought it anonymously. Sam knew." He looked up, stricken. "Could they have tortured it out of him? If it's the document they need?"  
Evans nodded grimly.  
"I think you'd better put that document somewhere safe, Mister Chandler," she said. "And let's go over any conversation you had with Sam about it."  
It was difficult to remember precisely. When he'd learned the young prince came from Alako, and that he knew about the Ukolo Manuscript, Chandler had waxed enthusiastic, brought in the translation and shown it him during a tutorial session. A rash move, as it proved, but Chandler hadn't then thought it was that important an item, not of more than academic interest. And poor Sam, if he had had the location of the document kicked out of him. Chandler could imagine the heavies who'd barged into his house, slapping the young lad around, holding him in some dark dank cellar somewhere, maybe things much worse, the kind of things rumour said Queen Hannah caused to be done to people.  
The school was beginning to get back to normal. The students seemed to be fearfully avoiding talking about Sam, as though by doing so they would attract similar misfortune to themselves. But the subject was there, in the atmosphere, and it seemed to be impossible to avoid it, the way that events can redefine the simplest unrelated thing; for example Chandler owned a pencil sharpener that was supposed to in some way represent the romance of international travel, showing an airliner flying between two tall square buildings: hotels, presumably. Past 11 September 2001 this wretched object suddenly took on an entirely new and unintentional meaning. He still kept the damned thing to sharpen his pencils on, but it seemed a bit tasteless. Now it seemed every lesson turned up some reference to hostage-taking or kidnapping or ransom, and there was a stunned second, like a compressed minute's silence, after every reference, before reality caught up with them and Chandler took control of the class once more.  
Fortunately Chandler hadn't seen the Headmaster lately. He had never got on with the fat baldy git, with his affected black gown and his strands of hair combed over a massive bald pate. He harboured a secret desire to see a passing bird of prey drop a tortoise on it, though giving the Head the same style of demise as Aristotle was perhaps hubris. He knew very well that the Headmaster thought Chandler was a mere points-collector, working his way up the educational ladder by gaining new qualifications just for the money involved. New teachers were paid pretty badly, it was true, but if you were able to teach a broad spread of subjects you could coin it fairly. Chandler was used to people assigning bad reasons to him. It was nothing new. Perhaps he wasn't strenuous enough, or something, or oily, or a peculiar gown-wearing nonce who used to grope choirboys in the chapel stalls. Still, he thought, who would you rather have the respect of, really; The Sad Mare or the students?  
The staff had come up with the Sad Mare anagram one night in the staffroom, late enough for the Head to have gone to his bed, when someone - not Chandler, it was that Lawrie Fishman that taught French for a year - had introduced a curious silver pipe into the proceedings and passed it round. Chandler, who'd never really smoked, took a couple of tokes. It was fine and mellow even though it hurt the back of his throat a bit, but during the night the concept of the Sad Mare really took over in his head. He saw a pale face with a turned-down mouth, bloodshot red eyes, like a particularly grotesque piece of cartooning.  
The next day he was fine, and while doodling between lessons realised that another anagram of Headmaster was The Mad Arse. He was only just able to stop himself giggling by the time the next class trooped in, and they could tell something was amiss anyhow.  
"Something funny, sir?" Gibbs Minor asked.  
"No," Chandler said, "not really."  
"Oh come on," Flixworth said. "You always tell us to share jokes."  
"Okay," Chandler said. "At the end of the class, allright?"  
So he had. It didn't, somehow, do his credibility any harm at all. Mr Chandler - or Chunderer, or Kung Fu Ken, depending on how far down the 'Jack Chandler / Jack(ie) Chan / Kung Fu' line you wanted to travel, was, the opinion went, a nutcase but not a bad one. It was also true that now and again you'd overhear one of the students referring to the Mad Arse.  
There weren't a lot of jokes at present, though. Sam had been popular, and some kind of life was suspended while the school waited to have one of its own delivered back to it. The students went on with classes and games and what have you, but more sullenly than before.

"How's the house-to-house coming along?" Evans asked, striding into the incident room. Anna Carver was in there, writing assiduously, but the room was otherwise empty. Sam Tallu's picture still stared cheerfully from the middle of the glass wall, which was otherwise covered with diagrams, pencilled annotations, and a very large area map.  
"Going well?" Evans asked her.  
"Apprehended two suspects," Carver said. "We thought they were Asanti but they seem to be Ako. Under arrest for possession of an automatic weapon and Class-A drugs. They could open a chemist's shop with what they had in that flat. Coke, heroin, crack, amphetamines, barbs, quaalude, you name it. We've got a team in the place now, taking the flat apart. Not a pretty sight."  
"And where are the prisoners now?" Evans asked.  
"In the cells," Carver said. "DS Francis was interviewing them but he thought they ought to be allowed to cool off. Things got a little hectic while we were arresting them. I don't know about the house-to-house, I expect everyone's out doing it."  
"Hello guv," said Luke Francis, arriving from the cells. As the door was open there was a distinct sound of banging. "Can you hear them? They really don't like being in there."  
"Akos, eh," Evans said. "I hope Her Maj doesn't hear about this. The Alako Her Maj, not our one."  
"They're villains," Francis said. "I don't know what happens where she's from … in fact from what I've heard recently I suspect it's worse than just a ten spot in dear old Parkie."  
"You heard that Chinese brass turned up?" Evans asked. "The one who got our schoolteacher friend burgled?"  
"Got himself burgled if you ask me," Carver said. "He should learn to keep it in his pants."  
"It isn't against the law…" Francis began loudly, but stopped. There didn't seem to be any point going on, and he was outnumbered, two women to one man. He had long since learned to keep shtum in situations like this.   
"Anyway, she says she could identify the men if we put them on parade.  
"So we've just got to find them. DS Francis, I want you to join in the house-to-house; in your case, farm-to-farm. Take DC Carver and try outbuildings, farms, in the Setts Lane sector." She drew a pointer across the map. "We haven't done that yet. Report every hour or sooner if you find anything interesting."  
"Ma'am," Francis said. "What about our little chums downstairs?"  
"Let 'em wait," Evans said. "I need a full dusting of that flat, though. We need to find whatever we can. Talk to DI Sherburne on your way out. Get the DNA cowboys in, see if they can come up with anything. Fuck knows there'll be something in that bloody cesspit." She shuddered.  
"Yes, ma'am," Francis said.

***

Kilonge and Oguno sat in the cells, separated by a thick brick wall from each other and the outside. Occasionally Kilonge could hear Oguno crying or whimpering; he knew his friend's voice even when it was like that, and heaven knew there had been times when crying had been the only thing to do. Then the police had arrived, kicked down the door in the way he had been told the British police liked to do, and arrested both of them for living in that flat. It wasn't their fault the place was dirty, and that was why the policewoman had hit him, nothing to do with the drugs or the guns.   
Or the drawings on the wall, Kilonge thought. He doubted the police had noticed them. The police still thought it was about the drugs or the guns, and as far as Kilonge could tell, it wasn't. He and Oguno toked up regularly to keep the bad stuff from happening in their heads. Even now he could just let himself lapse into a silvery mist, a comforting numbness. The voices went away when he did that; the staccato voices that spoke in a language that seemed vaguely familiar, but tantalisingly unfamiliar as well, as though they ought to have been able to understand it.  
When Kilonge was growing up, in a little village called Kapulu, a few kilometres outside Akdaro, he occasionally passed by the men's hut and saw a lot of men, sitting crosslegged in a red-lit space, and heard low words spoken, words that echoed in the words in his head now. When he asked his grandmother about it she told him,  
"It's a Yedjé ritual. It's one the men do. You'll find out later."  
Grandmother hadn't lied; in all her long life he didn't think she'd ever done so, not to him certainly. But the ritual wasn't Yedjé like any he'd heard about. Yedjé was about asking the help of the gods, for things like health and wealth and the prosperity of your family; its centrepoint was the smiling goddess Yemandja, lady of the reborn earth, of all growing things including crops and babies; its sky god, Chango, was equally benign, though you wouldn't want to cross either one of them, because if you did you got storms and earthquakes; but even storms were Chango revelling in his strength and power, and the people saw them as a gift, because at least they brought rain. There were demons, in the Yedjé pantheon, but they were controlled by the Lady and the God. What those men in the hut were doing was, Kilonge had since learnt, very different. The strange language had something to do with it; a lot to do with it, and so did the strange diagrams. Since he and Oguno came to London they had been plunged into a world of such strangeness and unpleasantness that simple beatings from the police, real or imagined, had very little terror by comparison.  
But he'd heard the Queen was here. Here, in London, and not only that, in this very part of town, in this suburb that didn't look quite as crowded and dingy as the rest of the city he'd seen. If the Queen found out they were here … he felt his genitals shrivel and try to crawl back inside his body at the thought of it. He wondered what would happen if the Queen was let into the cells with them.  
He was also determined not to tell those police officers anything. He knew that they might hit him again a few times, but being hit a lot of times, even, wouldn't be as bad as what could happen if he snitched. Let them think it was just drugs and guns; that seemed about right for London, from what he'd learnt in the six weeks he'd been here. Sure, he knew most people didn't live in circumstances as unpleasant as his own; he knew that not everywhere was full of people who'd shoot you down for the contents of your pockets. But that was no encouragement. He didn't understand how you could build places that went on so long without a respite for fields or a village. Even Akdaro, with its concrete buildings and its badly-driven battered cars, was a bit much for him and London had many times more people, was so much larger that there were trains just to connect one part of the sprawling city to another. There seemed no connection to the earth here, nothing to tell you the seasons were changing, and the oldfashioned Yedjé - that old-time religion, as one of the Quakers told him once - that he now wished he'd stayed with, was big on connection to the natural world. In another situation he might have made common cause with the local Pagan community, but what had happened instead was the man.  
The man introduced himself to the pair the day they arrived in London. The journey had started in Agadir; in Marseille, they'd been put in the back of a truck, under some boxes labelled as electrical equipment. It was a long, bumpy journey, an uncomfortable one at the dead of night, and they'd been allowed few stops to relieve themselves. When they were allowed out they were accompanied by two black guards, both holding pistols.  
Finally the truck pulled up and they were let out once more, to find themselves in a street, in a night that had no stars, only orange sick light reflecting across the clouds. The guards accompanied the two men into a house, and there, upstairs in the flat where the police had later found them, they saw him.  
Even now Kilonge found it hard to remember what the man looked like.  
But on that first occasion, he had been sitting crosslegged on a low stool, a big muscled man, bare-torsoed, with his long hair smeared with white clay. There was a necklace around his neck that was made of small human-looking bones. Kilonge felt he could not remember the man's face; sometimes it looked like a wolf's face, long and keen, and sometimes it was round, broad and wicked. For that matter, he was not even sure what colour the man's skin was. There was a smell in the room; the same smell that Kilonge remembered coming from the men's hut that time. He is a chief, Kilonge thought. He is seated on the royal stool of the Twi people and he has the bearing of a chief. Kilonge's natural inclination was to obey, and obey utterly; for this, he knew, he had been chosen for this task. Back in Akdaro they'd told him he was chosen for a very important job, one that needed keenness and dedication; and in Akdaro he'd felt he had just those things. Nevertheless he quailed before this man's gaze, and wondered if he could go through with it. Although the man was plainly a chief he was none like Kilonge had ever known. He reminded Kilonge of the Arab and Berber pirates, who menaced ships off the Alako coast, and who occasionally would swagger into town, accompanied by a bodyguard or two with an ill-disguised Uzi or Kalashnikov, and spend more money than Kilonge's father had ever earned in his life, on a night or two of women and drink. Sometimes the pirates would break the place up. Sometimes they would even roll a grenade or two into a bar to make sure the patrons and the owners forgot all about the night's activities. It was said that one of the most notorious pirates, Red Mehmet, thought an evening ashore was wasted if there were no fatalities, and preferably in double figures.  
The guards stood behind Kilonge and Oguno until the big man dismissed them with a wave.  
"So," the big man said, and the voice was like distant thunder. "My trusted servants, at last."   
"Yes," Oguno said. "lord."  
The man smiled.  
"Lord," he said. "That will do very nicely. I am the Master of the Cross Roads. And do you know what you are bidden?"  
"No, lord," Kilonge said.  
"No," said the Master of the Cross Roads. "You don't. All will be revealed."   
All had been revealed, it was very true. Kilonge wished for the millionth time or so that it hadn't. He lamented that the police had taken anything he could harm himself with; being dead now would be very convenient. He suspected Oguno was thinking something very similar.  
The window in the door slid back and a white face peered in, then looked away again, without comment, and the window slammed shut again, rasping metal on metal. Kilonge slumped against the wall, on the narrow bed that was the room's only furniture. He could hear Oguno crying again. He knocked on the wall.  
"Stop crying," he said in Ako. "They will be along to let us out soon."  
There was a muffled reply and then complete silence. Kilonge wondered if he'd told the truth, if they were in fact to be left here indefinitely, or for at least as long as that wretched journey to England had taken. He felt himself begin to shiver. He knew he was feeling the need of the smoke, and there wouldn't be any here.

***

The Queen sat in a plush sofa in her rooms in the Park Tower hotel and stared fixedly at Doctor Albert Tallu, who was morosely eating biscuits from a china plate a few yards away from her. Beyond him, for he was near-silhouetted against a high, long window, she could see a rainy greyblue sky, and a skyline of red brick buildings and the occasional sprout, for example the Telecom Tower like some kind of totem pole. The Queen was not happy. She had spent the night going through the various possibilities in her mind, and every so often turning on the light and heaving herself over to write on the little pad she kept by the bedside. The bed was comfortable enough; a large double bed, large enough for even her big frame; and the room held a cupboard, a washbasin and a shower, as well as a separate toilet and washbasin, which was civilised. She suspected from the way that tiny washbasin had been squeezed in that the hotel had had complaints from Muslims and other people from the non-white world that there was no way to cleanse themselves, unless they used dry paper, in the Western way, which was dirty as you couldn't get really clean that way. Albert - such a perfect name for a consort, dontyouthink, and no more likely to be named King than poor old German Bertie - had an adjoining room with a door between the two. His room was smaller, as befitted his status, but seemed adequate for him. I mean, it wasn't entirely his fault he couldn't actually close the toilet door when he was sitting on the toilet. He shouldn't eat so many biscuits, then he wouldn't need to evacuate all the time. Besides, he wouldn't want to be King. Quakers didn't believe in such things; they had always refused to doff their caps to any man or woman, and held all people to be equal. I try to treat everyone decently, he'd say; to suggest I be respectful to the Queen in particular is to suggest that there are some people I don't need to behave respectfully with.  
The Queen in fact had very few complaints about the way she was being treated. She had a winning way with complainants back home; she never threatened them; why would she, when threats weren't necessary? It was not for nothing that although her favourite film of all time was the film of Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard, as put to celluloid by Thomas Minfangeni, her favourite Western film was The Godfather. Marlon Brando's Don Vito could convey more menace with a lifted finger and a whispered,  
"You have displeased me,"   
than any number of bellowing thugs with big fists and low intelligences.  
Then again, you had to be able to do these things when you were a Queen. African swallow indeed! She knew what its cruising speed was, thankyou very much, and also that the Asanti net them and roast them half-living, the barbarians. She had done the country a favour by expelling them.  
No, the problem that kept her awake was not one of discomfort, nor was it really - if she was quite honest about it - concern for the safety of Prince Samuel. The boy must be found, that was certain, but the problem that made her scritch in her little hotel notebook with her little hotel pen was, Why has this been done, and By Whom?  
Lining up under starters' orders were the following runners:  
1\. the Asanti. Of course. It could be the Asanti had snatched him, and in this case why?  
2\. To get money for their political causes, in which case why hadn't they got in touch demanding a ransom?  
3\. To make a demand like the demolition of the Wall or some such. See problem with this, previous item.  
4\. They were going to kill him anyway.  
5\. Criminals from Alako or some other country demanding ransom. Previous item's problem applies here also.  
6\. A pervert who wanted to do nasty things to him.  
7\. A black magician. Similar to 3. But magic rather than sex.  
8\. Somebody who wanted something Samuel had or knew specifically.  
"It could be any of them," Albert Tallu said, between biscuits. "But as we haven't had a ransom demand, I suspect you're right about eliminating the first two. Eliminating the Asanti entirely, maybe. From our investigations, I mean."  
"Or maybe not," the Queen said. "you may not remember Aldo Moro. He was an Italian politician who was kidnapped in the 1980s. There was no ransom demand and he eventually ended up dead in the back of a car."  
"Let's hope not," Albert Tallu said. "This is my son we are talking about, remember."  
"We have to consider the possibilities," said the Queen, looking shrewdly at Tallu. "There is no time for shilly-shallying. We must gaze unflinchingly into the abyss and see if it winks at us."  
"I think it already has," said Tallu, pouring more tea for the Queen and himself.  
"Oh, no," said the Queen. "I think it's barely started."  
The telephone rang.  
"Hannah," said the Queen.  
"Oh I see. Not Asanti." She sounded disappointed. "Two Ako men, I wouldn't call them gentlemen. Am I permitted to see them? I am? That's splendid news. But you say we may have a lead? That is even better." She put the phone down and beamed.  
"A pair of little weasels have turned up and are now in the police station," she said. "I think we should go and pay them a visit."

When the Queen walked into the interview room, Kilonge took one look at her and felt urine seeping down his trouser leg. He stood, holding his right leg slightly behind his left in the hope that the Queen wouldn't notice, and bowed. Oguno bowed even deeper.  
"Sit," the Queen said. She was flanked by that fat Consort of hers, and a policewoman with short blonde hair who introduced herself as Detective Inspector Evans, another policeman, and an interpreter.  
The Queen sat opposite the two men, her impressive forearms on the table.  
"Now," she said in English. "Where is this man's son?"  
"We don't know," stammered Oguno.  
"No," said Kilonge. "We don't."  
"Do you know anything that might lead us to him?" Tallu asked. "Anything at all. Be reasonable, lads. I know you're not part of the gang, but you might know something."  
Do you? Kilonge thought. You don't know anything. You're whistling in the dark and trying to be reasonable. Bloody Quakers. You don't know what it's like.  
"Or I'll take a very personal interest in your case when you get back to Alako," the Queen said in Ako. A few more drips of urine seeped into Kilonge's pants.  
"Interpretation, please," Evans said.  
"Her Majesty asked them to cooperate," said the interpreter, which was no lie but not all of the truth.  
"And if we don't go back to Alako?" Oguno asked.  
"Oh you will," said the Queen. "Detective Inspector: are these men's immigration papers in order?"  
"They have no immigration papers," Evans said. "They are illegal immigrants."  
"Well then," said the Queen, beaming, and went on in Ako, "it's back home for you."  
"Her Majesty informed them that they will need to return home," said the interpreter.  
"Allright," said Evans. "Do you know why the boy was taken?"  
"No," said Oguno.   
"No," said Kilonge.  
"We think you're telling porkies," said Evans.  
"Pork … ?" said Oguno. What had this to do with food? Kilonge wondered. Though he was not feeling at all hungry, just shivery and needing the smoke.  
"Porky pies," Evans said. "Lies. We think you do know. You could make life a lot easier for yourself.   
"You haven't been in jail, have you? It's awful, Jonathan. You can't breathe for the stink of sweaty bodies. Then there's the noise: tannoy blaring out, boots on the catwalk, all day every day. You're banged up for twenty-three hours out of twenty-four, and even then we might put you in a cell with someone who's been done for beating up illegal immigrants, or a member of the British National Party. You'd like that; they really hate people like you."  
The interpreter talked some quick, twittering Ako and the men, who had half understood what Evans had said, looked even more frightened than before.  
"Of course if you do tell us," said Evans, "then maybe we'll understand that you were just a pair of poor lads who got sucked into this, that you were just dossing in the flat, and the weapons and drugs weren't yours. And that you don't deserve to go to prison at all."  
Kilonge and Oguno looked at one another. Oguno shook his head.  
"The drawings," Kilonge said. Oguno gasped.  
"Look at the drawings on the wall," Kilonge repeated. "And the writing. Maybe they have to do with it."  
Evans beamed.  
"No!" Oguno screeched (in Ako). "Gods, no! He'll kill us…"   
The interpreter made a note and held it up to show Evans.  
"On the walls?" Evans said. "Pearce, did we get pictures of the flat?"  
"Sure, guv," Pearce said. "I'll go and get 'em."  
"Cheers," Evans said, and returned her attention to Kilonge.  
"Thankyou, sir," she said. "Now we are getting somewhere. Maybe you'll even tell me what they have to do with it, and who put them there. Your Majesty, Mr Tallu; thankyou for your time. I believe we shall continue interrogations with these men separately. Can I call you a taxi, madam?"  
The Queen looked at the woman levelly as if wondering whether to reply "You can call me anything you like so long as you don't call me late for dinner." Instead she said,  
"Thankyou, that would be nice." She stood and glided out, Tallu in her wake.  
Kilonge shivered. What had he done? He saw hell opening up to catch him, whatever he did. He felt almost resigned to it. Whatever path he took now, it would be into nightmare.  
The young policeman came through the door, waving a sheaf of papers excitedly.  
"Look at this guv," he said, spreading the papers out on the table. "You seen these before?"  
The police looked at the papers together and Evans turned to Pearce.  
"In that book," Pearce said. "those funny pictures. These are the same."  
"Right, your alien porn."  
"Not my porn," Pearce said. "Mister Chandler's."  
"Sure," Evans said. "I think we need to get mister Chandler over to that squat in Shepherds Bush and let him have a look. Go and get hold of him. It might give us some lead on who's taken the lad, and where. These two are shtum."  
"Okay, guvnor." Pearce went out. Then Kilonge and Oguno were taken away.

"Who," she asked Oguno, facing him across a plain wooden table, "is the he who will kill you?"  
The interpreter repeated the question in Ako. Oguno didn't answer at first.  
"Who is he? The gang leader? What's his name?"  
"No name," Oguno said slowly, feeling the life drain out of him. "I will never give you his name." The door opened and DC Carver appeared. She beckoned Evans out and a few seconds later Evans came back in, smiling brightly.  
"That's encouraging," she said, sitting down again. "Your friend has told us. Now, we need you to corroborate that."  
The interpreter interpreted.  
"I will not give you his name," Oguno said. "This may be a trick. I cannot tell you his name."  
"Mulish obstinacy," said Evans, "is not a virtue. Now, I know you're afraid, Simeon, but who's to know if you tell us a name? We'll give you protection."  
"It will not help," Oguno said. "He can reach into your heart and stop it dead."  
Now that he had said this, the floodgates opened.  
"He has no face, and many faces. He is a chief, and a wizard. He is the Master …"  
Oguno stopped. Something very like a red insect was crawling out from behind the policewoman. It was a metre and a half tall, and glistened foully. Its smell was like the Smoke, but far stronger, choking. Its insectoid face pointed huge eyes at him. He felt nauseous. The creature chittered to itself, like an insane giggle.  
"No," he said, and pointed. Evans looked beside herself, and saw nothing. Her brow furrowed.  
"You feeling allright, Simeon?" she asked. "We're almost done here."  
"Keep it away from me!" Oguno babbled. He looked at the interpreter.  
"You can see it, can't you?" he cried.  
"See what?" the interpreter said. "There's nothing there."  
Oguno shoved his chair back and ran for the door, but found it was locked. Something pawed at his arm; a red furry claw. He turned round and found himself looking into the gleaming redblack eyes of the creature. He began to bubble at the mouth, and slid down the wall, tongue protruding from his mouth. The shivering was intense, now  
"He's going cold turkey," the interpreter said. "He's hallucinating." Simeon looked at her and tried to call for help but the creature kept up its damnable pawing. Its antennae - four of them on the top of its head - swept at the air. Its chittering filled his ears and he tried once again to get through the door. Then it hissed and Simeon Oguno felt a pain inside his chest. The world became very dark and cold and then there was nothing.  
Evans opened the door.  
"Medic!" She yelled. "Medic!"; but she knew it was already too late. Oguno's eyes were open, staring and bloodshot, the look on his face one of abject terror. There was no pulse.


	5. Chapter 5

DC Anthony 'Charlie' Pearce spoke to the school secretary who, understandably, told him that Jack Chandler was teaching a class at the moment.  
"I understand that," Pearce said. "He is a teacher, after all. But can you get hold of him as soon as he's finished. We need to speak to him urgently."  
"Well, I'll see what I can do," the secretary said, dubiously.  
"Unless you'd rather we came and fetched him," Pearce said. The secretary hissed an indrawn breath.  
"That really won't be necessary," she said in that primly shocked Lothians voice that had long earned her the nickname 'Janet', even among people who'd never watched 'Dr Finlay's Casebook'. "I'll leave a message in his mailbox."  
"Thankyou," said Pearce. Chandler might be able, if he saw the diagrams and the writing, to give them some idea what was intended, if - as Occam's Law suggested - the book and the kidnapping were connected. It was far more likely than that there were two completely different gangs in town, both having connections with the unfortunate Samuel Tallu. Had he known what Sam was doing at that precise moment - Terrie, having taken his virginity, showed no sign of giving it back - he might have gone easier on the 'unfortunate', but there was no denying the boy had vanished and those close to him were worried sick.

Jack Chandler surveyed the room above the shop in Uxbridge Road. He was shocked, as much or nearly so as Anna Carver had been. But for different reasons. Of course it was a pigsty; but that wasn't the point. He couldn't pretend he was used to encountering the dens of drug fiends, though you saw fictionalised accounts all the time on the TV. Besides, as he wasn’t the first person to think, the drugs weren't the be all and end all of the situation here. The decoration of the room told you there was something else going on.  
"I wouldn't ask to use the toilet if I were you," DI Evans said. She'd accompanied him here in an unmarked car, with a police driver, which Chandler in a boyish way found rather exciting. He shared the back seat with a photographer, a young Asian man who said not much but cradled his camera and apparatus absent-mindedly. He'd take any more pictures that Chandler thought might help. As senior officer, Evans sat in the front.  
"I won't," Jack promised. He was looking at the drawings, the mad sketches of women being impregnated by worms, people turning into birds, a wheel with flames and stars around its edge - surely the relative of a voodoo vévé, that one - but all of them horribly familiar from the Ukolo Manuscript.  
Then there was the writing. Scrawled in big letters across every wall, and all of it but that one Latin phrase in the unknown script the Ukolo MS used.  
He studied it carefully. It was nearly impossible at this remove to tell which bits of the MS any bit of text had come from; as apart from Chandler's Greek translation it had resisted any attempt at interpreting it, the text was dumb.  
"Can you tell us anything?" Evans asked pleasantly, standing close by him so she could try and see what he was seeing.   
"Not right off," Chandler said. "I appreciate you need to know now…"  
"Oh no," Evans said, smiling. "Tomorrow will do."  
She's being very nice, Chandler thought, as though she didn't have a major investigation on her hands; maybe this is the way she copes with it. And could I find anything out by tomorrow? I can ask one of the others to take my classes. It isn't as though I regularly skip the lessons I'm supposed to teach. Can't remember the last time I did, in fact.  
"And do I understand that you can't actually read the script?" Evans said.  
"Nobody can," said Chandler. "But I have the translation, if it is one, and a copy of the original. All I need to do - all! - is go through the original, find these bits and correlate them." He pointed at the walls. "Could be easier than you might think. I suspect the text comes from the same parts as these pictures. Mind you, having the text here suggests someone understands it. Someone else has a translation. Though if they do, why steal mine?"  
"What about that," Evans said, pointing to the Latin. "What does it mean?"  
"Free yourself…," Chandler began. "Originally it's Liberate tutame ex inferis. Free yourself from hell. Ex feris though, something like 'Free yourself from the wild'."  
"The two blokes we picked up," Evans said, "just mentioned the pictures. Look at the pictures, they said."  
"And then check back?" Chandler said. "Check the text around them?"  
That was the bunny. He was looking forward to it, if the truth be known. The business with Suzy and the burglary had brought him up short, made him wary, made him very nervous of letting anyone in; if he had some papers to deal with instead, that would be just the ticket.  
"Well, how long do you think it would take?" Evans said.  
"You said tomorrow," Chandler said. "If I can get someone to cover for me at school…"  
"We'll make sure you do," Evans told him.   
"… then I probably can get you something by tomorrow. The Manuscript isn't that long, fortunately. I think people in those days didn't write very long books 'cos they had to write it all out by hand. I'll tell you everything I find out. I suppose you want the why and the what do they want to do most of all. If I can tell you that, I will."  
"Stout man," Evans said. Constable Amroliwala had finished his taking of photographs.  
"I can give you them on CD as soon as we get back to the Station," he told Chandler. "Printouts also. Finished here, guv."  
"Okay," Evans said. "Let's go." They left the room, walking round the broken door. The strange smell that Chandler noticed as soon as he'd arrived was still there, and he sniffed a couple of times, trying to place it, but to no avail.

Chandler was ensconced in his study, with the photographs of the pictures on the squat's walls, and the translation to hand. The only sound was the ticking of his grandmother's old clock - which despite that, was not a grandmother clock, but a roll-sided ormolu black and gold thing on the mantlepiece - and the occasional car or truck going past, though as the study was at the back of the house, the traffic was scarcely heard from here. At night it was quiet enough to hear soft rain on the windows, though it wasn't raining at the moment. After his tea, Chandler had been outside into the garden, a square space lined by fences and trellis, and stood looking up at the crepuscular sky, purple and pinked with stars. Then he turned and padded back inside, to begin work.  
It was all starting to look rather frightening, as though someone, or something, was taking all this stuff seriously. He looked at the first picture, and already a chill started through him. Already he felt like having a drink, and that in itself was alarming, because it suggested the old defence mechanisms were coming back; and he didn't want that. There was no such thing as only one drink, not for him; once started, the demon roared and wouldn't stop. In the end, he and his wife had to stop; but separately, because by then the children were in care. It was both their faults; in each other's company they simply followed bottle of wine with pub visit, and then back to the offy for more wine. The offlicence on Bishops Road didn't help, offering three for the price of two offers on cheap East European rotgut. Their arguments got more and more acrid, each blaming the other: he could no longer remember details, but neither of them could back down so it became a vicious spiral.  
Then the violence started. For no apparent reason she hit him in the mouth one evening, then the next day hit him with a saucepan. When the police were called the redfaced policeman called him a 'wimp' for letting it happen.  
"Do you suggest I hit her?" Chandler asked, all the time noting the uniformed officer's collar number. "You know I'd get done if I did. You always blame the man."  
Violence in self-defence is no offence? Unless you're male, it seemed. In the end, after she answered some innocuous remark by hitting him in the face and calling him a 'pathetic old pig,' he decided it was time to get out. He started divorce proceedings the next day, and never went back to the house except to collect his possessions. Paula, who'd gone from a trim Size 10 blonde to a bloated lank-haired creature with no dress sense, checked into rehab a fortnight after he did.  
"If I'd stayed," he told his therapist, "I'd have had to defend myself against her or die. But society sides with women on this. People think 'domestic violence' just means men hitting women. But if a woman's portrayed on telly or in a film as being violent to a man, there's always the implication that he deserves it.  
"That's what they used to say about men beating their wives. And don't give me all that about men being stronger. A saucepan in the head hurts. I had four stitches in my scalp after that. I had to get out ... there are women's refuges, but where are the refuges for men? There aren't any. So we have to go back home, where the cycle of violence increases until the woman gets harmed. Then there's an arrest and you know who of."  
That really set the pattern for the rest of his life - though as he was careful to say, it was only the rest of his life so far - no alcohol, and escort girls whenever he felt the need and could afford it. He had a sense it was wrong - not because they were exploited, but because there was often no real connection, and sometimes after some Polish or Vietnamese girl had trotted off with two hundred pounds in her back pocket, courtesy indirectly of Jericho School, he wondered at how little satisfied he felt. Nowadays he preferred girls who spoke reasonable English, so you could at least make contact in more than just a physical way. Occasionally, yes, he just let go, thrusting between the thighs of some girl scarcely older than his senior students; indeed lived in the vague terror that tonight's young blonde would actually turn out to be someone he'd taught, though he figured it was unlikely, all things considered. It would, after all, be a disaster if she was still at his school: dismissal for Gross Moral Turpitude likely, though consenting sex with a student over nineteen years of age - thus avoiding most school students - wasn't an offence (why was it an offence at all, provided the girl was over the age of consent? Didn't the Government trust school governors? Plainly not), it could still land you in hot water if you were found out.  
Still and all, he hadn't had a drink since, and felt much better for it. The girls never had any complaints - except Suzy, he told himself, and she drugged me.  
But his attention was returned, riveted to the pictures before him, the illustration that had been drawn largest upon the wall: the picture of the insectlike, halfhuman creatures embracing humanity foully. It was as though they danced, but they did not dance so much as bestially copulate with the naked humans, male and female, that disported themselves around the picture. Here was a woman naked and pregnant, hand in hand with a creature with bulging eyes and antenna; and another cradled like a babe a thing with feelers and several legs. Here was the notorious picture of the worm with one end between the legs of each of two women; and above it a human couple grew birds' wings and flew.  
"This is madness," Chandler thought. Here, also, were the worms, rising from a darkened landscape, beneath a pattern of stars.  
And the boy, crowned with stars also, who sat facing forward, a naked girl prostrating herself at his feet and anointing his feet with a water-jug like the Tarot card of the Water Carrier. He was crowned but he was also chained; a fine chain passed around his waist and descended beside his chair to disappear behind it.  
That boy… he wondered. He had a West African cast of feature, not entirely like the chunky and brownskinned Samuel Tallu, but not unlike him. Sam could have stood in for the boy, it was true. He looked at the girl; she was pregnant, also, not hugely so but her belly and her breasts were swelling.  
Jack felt a chill, as though someone somewhere had left a door open, though they hadn't, and there was no wind accompanying it; it was just a chill in his soul on this cold autumn night.  
The text accompanying the pictures in the translation was by no means clear to decipher but, allowing for the possibility that whoever wrote it wasn't actually a Greek speaker, and had just been copying it, Jack managed to get something like this out of it:  
Be it known that in the world among us there walk those that are like men but are not men / they do crave to come again for they have known ? power in the world / in the ancient time they bred with the daughters of men / many there are who are not men nor women nor ? eunuchs / ? / the daughter of the king  
It looked like a warning. It looked like a suggestion that the acts hinted at in the pictures were not pure imagination, that the creatures had bred with humanity - some kind of alien breeding programme? He knew that many mythologies had stories about gods or demons breeding with humans. In Greek myth Zeus seemed to do nothing but, whether in the form of a bull (Pasiphae) or a swan (Leda). "Father of the Gods" was to be taken quite literally, not King of the gods in so much a sense as really the one who went around like a milkman in a 1970s smutcom, fertilising them all.  
Then there were the insect-creatures themselves. He'd seen similar, but only in nightmare, possibly one inspired by that old TV standby Quatermass and the Pit, where hordes of insectile demons hop by. They looked half insect, half human; impossible, yes, because you couldn't have an exoskeleton and an endoskeleton; but the limit to insect size is not the strength of the exoskeleton, as commonly supposed, but the insect's breathing apparatus, via tubercles, which only operate over short distances. If they'd develop something like the lung - as fish had - they'd be able to get much bigger. Perhaps, he told himself, they're a folk memory. That was an old standby. A folk memory of something else: Mokele-Mbembe, the dreaded horned 'dinosaur' of West Africa, possibly a memory of rhinoceros from the days when the area was grassland and rhinos lived there, before the forest encroached and so the rhino populations withdrew. Not a dinosaur at all, but dangerous enough, if not quite as pointlessly savage and badtempered as its aquatic cousin the hippo.  
But a folk memory of what? Insects? And giant worms? You were treading on the shores of science fiction here, and no mistake. Chandler turned away from the pictures and closed his eyes, but the pictures persisted behind his eyelids.   
It has to do with breeding, he thought. Breeding something.  
He couldn't imagine what, though. It also, unless he was sorely mistaken, involved Sam in that very same plot. Why else take him?  
Why indeed?

***

All good things come to an end, and if you can call being kidnapped a good thing, then this thing came to an end also. Though as the discerning reader will have noted, the good thing was not the being kidnapped but the regular sex sessions with Terrie. How I loved it when she came into my room and took off all her clothes. I was almost always ready for her, and she, as she once said, coming in, taking off her coat and then pulling her blue-yellow-red patterned dress off over her head, to reveal her white and pink-tipped curved nakedness underneath,  
"I'm wet."  
One thing concerned me, however. At Jericho, the rudimentary sex education classes we'd had insisted on the use of a condom to stop the spread of nasty diseases and unwanted pregnancies.  
When I asked Terrie about this, she just smiled and turned away.  
"Don't worry about it," she said. "I don't have anything nasty. Neither do you."  
"How do you know?"  
"Well, you don't, do you?" she asked. "It was your first time, wasn't it?"  
"Sure," I said.  
"And there hasn’t been anyone else?"  
I haven't seen anyone else under forty I very nearly said, but just said,  
"No, there hasn't." We were lying together on my bed, and outside a bird was twittering away madly; probably it had seen, out of the corner of its eye, the cat slinking about beneath the bushes. It was late afternoon. Vassily had been in, grinning about. I was certain he knew about me and Terrie, otherwise why the sly gestures that were undoubtedly the Russian equivalent of 'nudge nudge wink wink'?  
"But what if, what if…"  
"I get pregnant?" she said. "Don't worry about that, either."  
I must have looked alarmed, because she stroked my chest and said,  
"What's up? What would be so terrible if I got pregnant?"  
"Nothing here," I said, "but back home, they'd have my balls off."  
"That's terrible," she said.  
"Tell me," I replied. "If a boy under seventeen fathers a child he's castrated. The Queen says it stops unwanted pregnancy and having lots of children who can't be cared for."  
"But but," Terrie said, "in African societies don't children get brought up by aunts and grandmothers, and all that? Sorry for being so general about it, I've never been there."  
"That’s true," I said, "but the children still have to be brought up." It was true that the grandmother is a childcare function; that and the passing on of folk stories and myth.  
I still didn't know what her answer meant though. Don't worry if I do get pregnant or I can't get pregnant? Quite honestly I needed to know but Terrie took me in both arms and rolled onto me again, silencing my questions with her mouth and the avid movements of her lower body.

When she'd gone, I lay back, sleeping the sleep of the just-after, and eventually there came a knock at the door.  
It was Vassily. He didn't have his usual 'all lads together, corrrrr!' look; he looked serious.  
"Samuel," he said. "Please get your things together."  
"Things together?" I said.  
"Da, that is correct in English, is it not? 'Get your things together'. Please pack your bags. We are leaving."  
"We?"  
"Da, please do not repeat everything I say. I get angry if people repeat everything I say. Sometimes I break things."  
"Sure, Vassily," I said.  
He strode over to me and put a hand on the wall above my head. It was a very large hand. I could imagine it smacking me very hard.  
"My name not Vassily," he said.  
"Oh," I said, looking up. "What is your name?"  
"My name … my name is not important to you." He suddenly looked deflated, the storm gone as soon as it had come. "Call me Vassily if you like, is not important."   
"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to upset you. I could call you Ivan if you like."  
"Am not upset," he said, moving away, then making quickening gestures. "But come, please, get ready. Get dressed. I am not noncy-boy, do not want to see your naked body. Idi sodar. Half an hour, we go. Da?"  
"Da," I said. "Allright."

***

Heather Thorpe had been at work since eight that morning. She hadn't perhaps realised that being attached to the police meant not only early starts, even if she did live just off the Park Road, a suburban area of Moreford that although heavy on the traffic and the locals in trackie bottoms and Burberry caps with added cheap jewellery, had the dual advantage of being reasonably cheap and near the town centre. The police station was a twenty-minute walk or five to ten minutes on the bicycle. It also meant some long nights. The crime scene team had arrived with samples and wanted them a.s.a.p.  
Heather, graduated in Life Sciences at Westminster University five years earlier, had drifted between lab jobs until gravitating to the police. Now, and despite the early starts, she wouldn't want to work anywhere else. Without a police record for anything - unusual in her generation, or so she claimed - she'd worked her way not so much up as in.  
"Interest me," she'd say, to almost anyone or anything that came in. Samples from crime sites, bits of effluvia, scrapings from car wheel arches, or in this case, from a flat in West London that DI Evans had managed to whip while the local boys were looking the other way.  
Heather wanted to be Cordelia Evans when she grew up. If the Detective Inspector was anything to go on, she'd landed in the right place.  
She was a tall woman, was Heather; a fraction over one metre eighty, and with curly blonde hair that in her teens had been down to her waist. Now it was shorter, not least because she had to tie it back and cover it when she was working in the lab.   
These late nights didn't help her social life, though she made up for it whenever she could. Besides, she hardly ever saw her partner anyway: Rob Stephens was a musician, and American, both of which meant he wasn't in London that often. It had been a few months since she went to New York to see him last; too long.  
But now, at work, she reminded herself to focus. The lab was cold, and she stood there alone, a lean figure at a bench.  
DNA samples; what did we do without them?  
She, working at a microscope, teasing out the minuscule threads … one here, cut, sample … another, cut, sample … then run it against the database.  
Results percolated, trickled, moved slowly through; and one of the samples was straightforward, human, African origin; which made sense given that the people in the flat had been West Africans.  
So was the next.  
But the third, though.  
The machine bleeped at her reproachfully, the screen telling her NO MATCH FOUND. All it would say was that it was animal, of some kind, which told her nothing. The computer had trawled its database of matches, that included just about every species imaginable, and come up with: NO MATCH FOUND.  
That can't be, Heather thought. Just can't. We're accessing the largest, most comprehensive DNA match database in existence, and this doesn't have any kind of match? I don't believe it.  
What could she note that down as, then? Unknown Animal?  
She had a look at the patterns as they came up. There were human correlates in the sequence - but there were too many things that were different. The number of pairs is no indicator of sophistication. Humans have 23 but a frog has many more: being coldblooded it needs a mechanism for dealing with high and low temperatures, whereas humans simply regulate their own temperature to 36.9 degrees.  
Here was what looked like a full sample of the anomalous DNA. Two helices …  
This whatever-it-was had 21 pairs   
… pairs? …  
but 84 chromosomes.  
Quadruplets.  
Four strands of DNA.  
"Jesus Christ," said Heather, and she wouldn't have been any more surprised if she had had Yehoshua bin Yusuf's DNA under the scope, a holy relic for the space age.  
Well, y'know, it just has to be a mechanical misfunction. I can't go into Cordelia Evans and look into those grey cool eyes and tell her what I think this is …  
They'll throw me into the laughing academy. Heatherkin, they'll say, you've been working too hard, and while you're at it let's talk about the late hours you keep, you can't keep it up this long. Time to take a rest.  
She was breathing shallowly and she could feel the skin at her fingertips feeding back to her, the electricity of her nervous system coursing slowly, and her heart and the blood rushing to her brain were like an express train.  
She found another sample. The same result - four strands, 84 chromosomes. Then she checked the earlier samples again. 23 chromosomes, two strands, African ancestry with some Arab, no known individuals but an ethnotype that caused no problems whatsoever.  
What the hell could produce this?  
She picked up the phone.  
"Evans?"  
Gotta ask her, she thought.  
"It's Heather," she said. "I've got … something I'd like you to look at."  
The DI strode in moments later.  
"Funny results," Heather said, as neutrally as she could.  
"I'm not a scientist, just a meathead cop," Evans said. She grinned furiously, daring Heather to agree with her, though the younger woman certainly didn't. "Please explain in words I can understand. 'Funny' is probably a good start, but vague. What do you think it is?"  
"I don't like to say," Heather told her. "But it isn't … well, human."  
"Animal? What kind of animal?"  
"None the computer knows about," Heather said. It was true so far.  
"Must be a misreading," Evans said.  
"That's what I thought," Heather said, "or else: look. Four-stranded DNA. That, well, doesn't exist. Only very briefly and not in this kind of situation."  
"Well, what are we looking for?" Evans said, sympathetically. "What are the other samples?"  
"Human. West African," Heather said, "with some Arab influences."  
"That suggests Ako," Evans said. "I've been reading up, me. But this one you say is different?"  
"Very different." You can say that again.  
"Heather," Evans said, guiding her away from the machines, "what is it? What do you think? Tell me."  
The tech took a deep breath.  
"You'll have me locked up," she said.  
"Try me," Evans said, with a genuine warm smile. "I'm a cop. I'm used to seeing odd things."  
"Okay," Heather said levelly. "But this is weird shit.   
"I think it's either a mutation, though that's unlikely; or an alien life form. Whatever those African guys had in their flat, I don't think it's from Earth at all."  
Evans was quiet for several seconds. Then she put a hand to her forehead and eventually said,  
"Yeah. Like you said … weird shit.  
"You do know this doesn't happen, don't you?" the DI went on. "That can't be the answer. You've been watching too many sci-fi movies. I mean, this is what? The Brother from Another Planet?"  
"Not my scene at all," said Heather, who preferred art house movies and those rare romantic comedies that were actually funny. "The machine is working properly," she insisted. "It identified the two African guys, or someone else of similar origins. I tried them again afterwards. It's just that this sample - " she tapped the scanner - "has four strands of DNA, with some human-like chromosomes but some which are just plain weird."  
"So what are we looking for?" Evans asked.  
"I have no idea," Heather Thorpe said. "No idea at all."


	6. Chapter 6

He was sitting reading something that came with glossy pictures - about the level he was working at that time - full of dying suns, planets enslaved to the Great Emperor, and the distinct feeling of someone sitting on a beach and whinging,  
"What's the point? What's the point?"  
And if anyone walked out of the burning desert it was only with an H-bomb on a trailer, ready to become Death the Shatterer of Worlds. It was a brill idea to drop the occasional bit of hard alarmist scifi into magazines more concerned with country living and house prices and Barbour Jackets, but was it entirely wise?  
"Yes, but I reject all that," Chandler said, "It's a fucking illusion. The illusion of dystopia is as pernicious as the illusion of utopia. Be one with the real. That's the bunny."  
And why anyone would leave that kind of style-wank rag around in a police station was another matter. What did they mean, nobody could see him? Chandler had been sitting on the plastic bench for twenty minutes, while a uniform-branch sergeant behind a bulletproof glass screen sat doing a crossword.  
"What, nobody?" he said. "I have vital information." The policeman looked up briefly.  
"Sure, squire," he said, and went back to his crossword. Chandler went back to sharing a waiting room with a large Afro-Caribbean lady in cure of a small child. He hoped the child didn't get her hands on the magazine he'd been reading - it would distort her worldview inordinately. As though the poor scrap probably didn't have it already distorted by surface gloss, what with brand names and style marks, losing the sense of an individual culture and replacing it with media feed - prolefeed was what it was, Chandler thought, not for the first time, and probably the reason he'd become a teacher in the first place, giving some of the kids an idea if he could, though if that was the case, how come he was teaching in a private school in Surrey rather than a comprehensive in Bermondsey?  
Perhaps the better-off kids were even more in need of that change of worldview than the poor ones. It wasn't in their nature to rebel, any more than it had been in his; he, like James Dean in Rebel without a Cause, had known he was angry, but not about what. He tried movements like others tried drugs: the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Workers Revolutionary Party; and both these tagged him in some Whitehall filing cabinet as a dangerous rebel when what he was really looking for was some way to define himself against the Coca-colonisation of his country. Then again, for ten years he just got pissed, and that didn't work either.  
"Maybe all you want is love," someone had once told him: Nalini, a tantric sex specialist from St John's Wood. He'd spent four Saturday afternoons in her rooms in a big Victorian house, relaxed and often vigorous sessions of sex and meditation. Nalini was from Kerala, and was darkskinned and mischievous; even in her high heels her head was at the level of his shoulder, and as a result - being selfconscious about her lack of height - her shoes were the last thing she took off when she got naked for him. She took her profession very seriously, but was also the best fun imaginable.  
He didn't know why he'd never been back. Transference, probably; if he was ever going to fall in love with a brass, it was going to be Nalini, and besides, she wasn't - he told himself - exactly a brass. She was as close as he'd yet come to his perception of paid sex as a form of healing: putting the sex back into sex therapy. So the course of sessions was over, and if one sentence had stuck it was that. All he did want was love, and forever drove it back and away.  
"'Scuse me, sir," the sergeant said, in the kind of tone of voice that usually carries on, 'You can't smoke in here.'  
Chandler looked up.  
"DI Evans will be down to see you in five minutes, sir," the cop said. "She's been in with the Superintendent."  
"Thankyou, officer."  
The sergeant nodded and went back to his crossword. Where did we get this 'officer' bit from? Chandler wondered. It's American, undoubtedly, but in this case, no bad thing. They're all officers, after all, and it saves having to check their shoulder badge before addressing them.

Eventually he was waved through and met Evans in the comfortable interview room. She looks drawn, Chandler thought, not her usual bonny self; shadows under her eyes. Evans sat in an armchair, looking diminished.  
"You've had a look at the pictures," Evans said, hopefully. It sounded more than hopeful to Chandler, as though she was depending on him for some good news, and she hadn't had any for a while.  
"Yes," Chandler said. "As far as I can tell, it's something about a breeding programme. But it's weird. There's stuff about insects, and the text rabbits on about "They who are not men nor women nor eunuchs" - something else entirely. It's like they're talking about aliens."  
"Aliens?" Evans said, biting back something more. "I see. But it didn't say where they'd gone?"  
"No," Chandler said.

No sooner had Evans gone back to the incident room from the profiling lab, than the Superintendent called her upstairs and demanded the whole story.  
Halloran, she knew very well, wasn't going to swallow some cock and bull story about the DNA not being from Earth; but she had to tell him. Halloran, a shrewd grey-haired man, had eyes that could look into your very soul and unpeel it, and had done so to many a villain who found himself confessing and not realised what he'd done until he was in Parkhurst.  
"Our DNA expert," Evans said, "believes that some of the samples that were taken from the flat in Shepherds Bush belong to a non-Earthly life form."  
There was a long, deadly silence. Halloran steepled his hands and looked at Evans over them.  
"Does your DNA expert," he asked eventually, "take mind-altering drugs?"  
"No, sir, I…"  
"Then the fault must be in the machinery, must it not?" Halloran enquired reasonably.  
"Not necessarily, sir," Evans said, concentrating on the desk calendar in front of and slightly to the side of Halloran, the better not to get in the line of that basilisk stare.  
"Are you, Detective Inspector, presuming to suggest that there are aliens - I mean space aliens - wandering around London?"  
"No, sir," Evans said. "It's just that the DNA result was inconclusive. I am just repeating what Heather - Ms Thorpe - told me. I'm no scientist."   
"Meanwhile," Halloran said, "the house-to-house search has turned nothing up and there have been no sightings?"  
"No, sir," said Evans.  
"What shall we tell the Queen?" Halloran asked. Evans wondered if he was being rhetorical.  
"Well?" Halloran demanded.  
"That we're investigating at full speed," Evans said.  
"And meanwhile who knows what could be happening to her son."  
"We are investigating," Evans said. "It's just," she added miserably, "that nobody has seen anything. We've asked around in the neighbouring villages to the school, we've asked all the students at the school… nothing. Zip. Nada."  
"Quite," the Superintendent said. "And meanwhile there has been a death in custody. Heart failure, I'm told. A tragic accident and all that. Do you realise what the repercussions could be if the Press got hold of it? They're jumpy enough as it is what with people dying in police cells. Give them any kind of excuse to trumpet their malarkey about Britain being a police state, and they'll take it. The Press don't know, do they, Cordelia? Give me that consolation at least."  
"No, sir," Evans said. "They don't know. The other prisoner is still in the cells and he isn't saying anything."  
Neither, she felt, was anyone else. The boy had vanished entirely; and given that there had been no ransom demand nor communication, she feared the worst.  
The Superintendent sat back in his big leather chair.  
"Find the boy," he said. "I don't want to hear about aliens, or anything else like that. But find him. Dismissed."  
"Sir," Evans said, leaving.  
Bastard, she thought once on the other side of the door.

So Chandler, coming up with a lot of stuff about an alien breeding programme, didn't ease her worried mind nor sweeten her temper one bit.  
There was a knock at the door.  
"Just thought you ought to know, ma'am," said DC Carver. "I've heard from DS Francis."  
"Just coming," Evans said. She stood up.  
"Could you wait," she asked Chandler, "just a minute. Don't go anywhere."  
"Now," she said, out in the corridor, "Do you have news for me?"  
"He's found the truck the kidnappers used," Carver said. "A farm near Monks Wellow. There's another set of tyre tracks we think belongs to a Citroen ZX. He's now going into the village to see if he can get any leads."

***

In the village of Monks Wellow, an idyllic place of white houses and thatched roofs, but unfortunately also a place of heavy road traffic, DS Francis had been asking around to see if anyone had spotted the Mercedes, when he was hailed by a woman of about forty who named herself as Sandra Porter. She was wearing the standard tweedy jacket and sensible skirt of her coevals, and told them,  
"My daughter's gone missing. So has my father-in-law."  
Now, this was interesting, so Luke thought. Sitting her down in a teashop he heard the whole story come out.  
"My daughter's called Terrie. She's seventeen. She left school this summer and works in the hairdresser's in Broad Street, it's the only one in the village. But last night she didn't come home. I thought she'd stayed with a friend, maybe a boyfriend - I think she has one now, though she wouldn't tell me, of course - but she hasn't shown up today. I rang her mobile phone but there's no answer."  
"Could she have gone off with her boyfriend?" Francis asked. "Do you know his name?"  
"No," the woman said. "I think he had something to do with Wellow Farm."  
"Oh?" Francis said. "We're … very interested in Wellow Farm at present. Had she been going there?"  
"She'd been over that direction a few times," Mrs Porter answered. "That's why I think her boyfriend lives near there. But there's nobody living at the farm nowadays, hasn't been for some time."  
"Do you have a picture of Terrie?" Luke asked. Mrs Porter rummaged in her large leather handbag and produced a passport-photo-sized snap, which showed a pretty and intelligent-looking girl with long dark hair and dark eyes.  
"Keep that," Mrs Porter said. "Her hair's a bit curlier now, but apart from that, she's the same. That was taken this summer for her passport."  
"What was she wearing?" Luke asked. "When you last saw her."  
"Oh … her blue top, I think it was, with red and yellow flowers. Black trousers, and a black puffa jacket. A terrible combination but it looks great on her." The woman smiled, baffled and yet enthralled by suddenly having a beautiful young woman for a daughter, where only recently there had just been a child. "Most things do."  
"You mentioned your father-in-law also," Luke said.  
"Yes," said Mrs Porter. "He hasn't shown up either. He's usually about. He lives up towards Wellow Farm, in the old Manor gatehouse. But I drove up there today and he wasn't there. He normally comes round for elevenses, you see.  
"I've no picture of him to hand," she said, "though I could find one."  
"That'd be useful," Luke said. "What's his name?"  
"Norman," Mrs Porter said. "He's seventy-seven. Got all his marbles, though, really, even if he is a bit slow on his legs these days. Used to play football for East Berkshire, he did. Got a try-out for Arsenal once, he was potty about Arsenal. Still is. He also never stopped telling us, either. My poor husband … well, my poor husband."  
"Is he no longer with us?" Luke asked, as the woman and he drank tea from gold-rimmed white bone china teacups. The tea was good; not stewed, not too weak, just right, Luke thought.  
"In a manner of speaking," Mrs Porter said. "He's in Colney Hatch." She burped delicately. "He was detained under Section 91 of the Mental Health Act in 2001. I go and see him occasionally but he doesn't remember me. I think it's all the drugs they give them." 

Get Snippy, Luke thought. What a name! In the hairdressers, a mock-Tudor building in a sidestreet, next to a pub called the Lamb and Ferret, he spoke to a strawberry blonde called Sharon: a girl of about twenty, with round glasses, a lowcut green top, and an endearing West Country accent. She told him,  
"I were surprised, right. Terrie's always pitched up to work. I mean, 'er's clever enough, she could of kept on at school, then gone to Uni, but she come to work here instead, 'cos this is what she likes doing best. Did her Diploma and she was going on to her City and Guilds. Never thought she were going to skip."  
"And her boyfriend," Luke said. "What about him? Do you know who he was?"  
"No," Sharon said. "She used to talk about her boyfriends - not that she had many. But this one, she'd occasionally giggle and drop hints, but she didn't say much. One funny thing she said was - oh, I shouldn't say this …"  
"Why not?" Luke said.  
"You might get offended," Sharon said.   
"Try me," said Luke.  
"Okay," Sharon replied, looking round, though the salon was empty but for her and the policeman. "What's thirty centimetres long and white?"  
"I don't know," Luke said. "What is thirty centimetres long and white?"  
"Nothing," Sharon said. "If it's thirty centimetres long, it's black." She giggled, then looked dubious. "So, based on that," she said, "I reckon her new boyfriend's a black guy. Oh," she said when there was no response. "I have been offensive, haven't I? Sorry about that."  
"Offensive?" said Luke. "No. It isn't that. I reckon you've given us a lot of help, that's all. She didn't hint as to anything else about him? Never mentioned a name?"  
"Well, no name, but she did say something about cradle-snatching," Sharon said. "That’s about it, though."  
"I see," Luke replied. "Sharon, you've been a great help. If you think of anything else, let us know." He handed her a card.  
"I might give you a call anyway," Sharon said, with a cheeky smile. "Are you married, Sergeant?" She squeezed her shoulders together, increasing the depth of pale cleavage.  
"I have a partner," Luke said. "A girlfriend. I'm as good as married."  
"Shame," Sharon said, "I'd like to find out if it's true. About the thirty centimetres."  
"'Course it's true. Every bit of it," Luke said, and left.

The Manor Gatehouse was a foursquare redbrick cottage on a narrow lane, not large but handsomely put together. Luke knocked at the door twice but there was no answer. Eventually there was the sound of a creaking door from behind him.  
"You won't find him in," said an elderly woman, in a blue-and-white blouse and a mobcap, peering at him from the reddled doorstep of a similar house on the other side of the lane. "I reckon 'e's gone."  
"Gone, Madam?" Luke said. He trotted over the road and showed her his warrant card. "I'm a police officer. I would very much like to speak to Mister Porter."  
"'Spect you would," said the woman, chewing her toothless gums. "Knock the door down, see if I care, 'e's either gone and packed 'is bags, or 'e's shuffled off this mortal coil."  
"And joined the choir invisible," Luke concurred. "How long ago since you saw him?"  
"Yest'day morn," the woman said. "'E usually goes and sees 'is daughter in law in the mornings. Nice gel. Not today though. I reckon you should go in and 'ave a look."  
"Thankyou, madam," Luke Francis said.  
"Miserable old get," the woman said. "Not you, I don't mean. I mean 'im. Still, it don't mean I'd wish 'im ill." She shuffled inside and shut the door.  
No, thought Francis, but I expect somebody did.

The house was musty inside, as though the doors and windows were hardly ever opened; it was much as Luke Francis had expected, a small staircase leading up from the left hand side of the entrance hall, and a door open to the right. Francis and DC Carver trod inside carefully.  
"Norman," Francis said. "Norman!" there was no reply.  
The living room was full of 1950s furniture, red and black-patterned fabrics, a round black wooden table and a pair of armchairs. Above the white-tiled fireplace there was a red and white scarf, pinned to the wall: ARSENAL woven into its length, and the famous gun symbol, representing the team's origin at Woolwich Arsenal, at each end. Photographs on the walls showed, Francis supposed, team portraits, and some of the team's most celebrated players. Luke Francis knew nothing about football, and when Norman Porter had tried out for them it would have been sixty years ago, at the tail end of the Second World War, a period dimly remembered. They were black-and-white photographs, and showed only white men, with brilliantined haircuts, and big baggy shorts.  
There was nobody in the living room, alive nor dead. At the back of the room, French windows, firmly locked, let out onto a small paved area that you could only with kindness or estate agent's exaggeration have called a garden.  
Nobody in the kitchen, either, where the washing up appeared to have been done; there were no mouldy plates nor congealing dollops of food.  
"Maybe he has just gone," Anna Carver said.  
"I don't like it," Francis said. "That old lady didn’t think he'd do something like this. A lot like his granddaughter, in that, then."  
They even looked in the understairs cupboard: a hoover, a four-wheeled shopping trolley, a fusebox, nothing else.  
"Can you smell that?" Anna Carver asked.  
Luke Francis sniffed. There was something in the air, it was true, a sweetish smell, above the fustiness of the house.  
"Upstairs," he said.  
The smell grew stronger as they went up the stairs and Luke was full of foreboding. He knew very well what odd smells might portend; he'd smelt decay before, like the time he'd been called to break down the door of an old lady who'd not been seen for a month. She'd died in bed and her cats … well, they were hungry, as he said at the time, though it didn't stop him giving one a good hard kick that took it over the bed, where it yelped and vanished under a cupboard.  
There was one bedroom, but no decaying body in the blankets; the sheets were rumpled and a pink blanket pushed back by an arthritic hand, but nothing untoward, and the clock on the mantelpiece ticked on.  
Then Anna called out, a hoarse and urgent exclamation.  
"Guv! Guv!"  
Francis tore himself away from contemplating the clock and ran to find her.  
Anna Carver was standing in the doorway of the bathroom, with a horrified look on her face.  
Norman Porter was sitting on the toilet, fully clothed. Mouth distended, eyes wide open, and in his last agonies, his hand had clutched the towel rail and dragged it down. His face jaundice-yellow, he was very clearly dead.   
Luke looked at him and shuddered. There was something in his face that spoke of a man who had seen hell, and quite possibly was there now. The smell was overpowering; the smell of death. He'd smelt it before, but not quite as strongly as this.  
"He looks," Anna murmured, "like he died of fright."  
Luke Francis could only agree.  
"Call an ambulance," he said. He kept looking at Norman as though he could imagine what the old man had seen in his last moments.   
"The bastards killed him," he said finally, turning away and following Anna downstairs.

"It's just the same," Anna said, as they were watching the ambulance crew stretcher the body out, covered by a sheet. Predictably the woman opposite was standing on her reddled doorstep, arms folded, watching the unfurling scene with an emotionless stare.  
"Same as what, Anna?"  
"As that man Oguno, at the station. He looked the same way. Like he'd been scared to death. But Inspector Evans said there was nothing there, he just started backing into the wall and then collapsed."  
Two deaths in this case, Luke Francis thought. And neither of them obviously murder, but both of them … like this. Something or someone was playing hardball, and also playing hard to get.  
"We need to find that boy," Carver said. "And the girl. Especially the girl. I don't care if she did go of her own free will, or thought she did. I think something here is messing with people's minds."  
The Scene of Crime people were swarming through the house like insects, white-suited, taking pictures. They'd already smudged Norman on his throne like Elvis eating his last hamburger, and the sight of that, Francis realised, was going to stay with him all his days. It wasn't that it was particularly gory nor violent; it was just grotesque and bloody awful, and that was worse. There was no dignity in a death like that, terrified and staring, pissing himself even though he was on the karzi. It was like nothing human, more like a monkey cornered in a cage, baring its teeth and facing death by impossible odds.  
"Nobody closed his eyes," Francis said. "Too afraid to touch anything. He went into the ambulance with his eyes open. If you see what I mean."

***

They bundled us into a car, like they had done the first time, only this time it wasn't quite as sudden. Nor was the car anything like as big. Although I'd mainly been fretting that I would never see Terrie again, imagine my delight when I found she was coming with us.  
She stood in the farm yard, wrapped in her black puffa jacket, and grinned.  
"Time to go," she said. I found myself staring at her.  
"Why are you going?" I asked. "Why are we going … where are we going?"  
"Couldn't miss it," she said. "It's an adventure. So many questions."  
"But we've been …"  
"Chosen," she said airily. "You know what your destiny is, don't you, Sam. And it isn't just to give me what for, though I will admit that's fun." She smiled and reached out a hand. I took it and felt her pulse joining with mine.  
Vassily, or Ivan, was standing by the car door, smiling absently.  
"Come on," he said. "We have to go."  
"He's right," Terrie said.  
"But," I began, digging my heels in for a start. "I have to go back to school. I want my family. I want to see my dad."   
"You will see him," Ivan said, shaking his head. "Soon enough. Your true father."  
"What do you mean," I said, "my true father?"  
"Not Doctor Tallu," Ivan said. "He is not your father. He may be, biologically, it is true, but he is not your destiny. We are taking you to your destiny."  
"Come on, darling," Terrie said. She put both arms around my neck and pressed herself to me. Despite myself, I found myself reacting, ready once more to give and receive pleasure with that other body I now knew so well. She chuckled and blew in my face. A strange scent enveloped me, and I felt the world spinning. Before I knew it, she was helping me into the car, Ivan was in the driving seat, and we were driving away, bumping through the puddles in the concrete of the half-abandoned farmyard, past the derelict machinery and out onto the road beneath the noble green trees. Terrie had a hand on my leg and was sitting close by me in the back. A white signpost flickered past at a junction but too fast for me to read it.  
"Where are we going?" I asked, for the dozenth time, I was sure. I watched out through the windscreen, and looked at Ivan's firmly set head as he drove, watched the speedometer needle rise as we headed down a long straight lane between high mossy hedges. There was, however, no answer, and my captors were as silent as those hedges.  
I felt betrayed. Had Terrie been one of my captors, then? Was she in on the plot, not just a pretty village girl who came along and fucked me of an afternoon?  
But I felt her hand stroking my leg and realised that for now I didn't really care. What could they do to me?  
Well, thinking about it, there was quite a lot they could do to me. I just didn't want them to hurt Terrie as well. I thought about the smell and the words I'd heard in the hut, all those years ago, and felt increasingly certain that this had to do with that; that everything in my life had to do with it, and poor Father, with his Quakerism and his biscuits, had been trying to keep it away from me, and me away from it.  
The car tunnelled its way through a flickering of dappled light and shade and carried us onward.  
Eventually we broke cover from the woodland and began our journey through small villages, each one darting by in a cluster of small houses; for some reason I began to feel more at home. It was the greater distances, the view of distant hills though they were not as high as the Mwenzororo mountains at home that I'd been used to; and the sight of chickens scratching in a yard brought a tear to my eye. A donkey tethered to a tree could have been tethered to a mopani tree in a village back home. I turned away from Terrie, and simply stared out of the window. This, although it was an alien land, had enough in common with home that it simply reminded me how far from home I was; how I should not, I told myself, ever have left my homeland to come here, where I didn't know anyone and had no family ties.  
The road rose and fell, straight as an arrow, over a range of green hills; this would have been one of the Roman roads, I realised, something alien to the cultures who came later and built winding roads around villages and field systems. But Ivan drove without commentary, and when I looked at Terri, she was drowsing, head nodding forward, as though the slow rhythm of the wheels was too much for her to stay awake, and she badly needed to catch up on her sleep.  
I had never felt less like sleeping. I did not know what the hell was going on and would very much, now the initial shock was wearing off - and it had taken long enough to do that - have liked to know what in hell was happening.  
I think I got some inkling when in the distance I caught sight of a long, black building, its sides ribbed with grey pillars, and on the flat ground in front of it, white shapes; and a distance to the left, an orange windsock that tugged and pointed in the breeze like a dog.  
"We're going flying," I said, "aren't we?"  
Ivan said nothing, but nodded.

We arrived at the airfield, and the car pulled up outside the hangar, which looked very big from here. I'd occasionally passed by Alako's one airfield, at Kolokolo, recently upgraded to airport status and where airliners from Britain or France or Germany stopped off once a week or so; the two brand-new hangars there were about the size of this one, and they were the largest buildings in the country, and so the press never stopped telling us. Alako has no air force, and so any aviation development is driven purely by the airlines and the handful of bush pilots, who really don’t need anything more than a place to refuel and somewhere to tie the 'plane down overnight. A small knot of people standing outside a grey-brick house split off and walked towards us. The lead man, a black African dressed in some kind of military fatigue gear, and who had short hair and double horizontal scars on his cheeks, grinned broadly as he saw Ivan, punched him on the arm and greeted him in Ako.  
I was surprised as anything when Ivan answered in that language. I'd never known he spoke it. But then, we had Russian advisers in the 1980s, during the illfated flirtation with Soviet communism, and more recently the Russians had been trying to get influence in the country again.  
Ivan climbed out of the car and motioned us out. I couldn't but notice that the African had a gun; a concealed sidearm in a holster, but a gun nonetheless. I wondered who he was expecting to use it against. The three others - two men and a woman - were also all African. I should really have felt at home among so many of my own people, but given the circumstances, excuse me if I didn't. We have bandits enough at home, particularly the Asanti, who wouldn't think twice about shooting you dead and leaving your body in a ditch. By the time the hyenas had been at your remains, there'd certainly be no way of identifying your killer. Although we have no air force, we do have an army that deals with bandits, and a navy that defends our shipping against pirates, though some do seem to get through.  
The foursome did speak Ako, though, which was a plus. I looked at their faces; as varied as Ako people are, the woman was equatorially dark and one of the men was as lightskinned as a Berber, with the other two inbetween; but all of them had the same horizontal scars across the cheeks. I wondered if there was something in common as well as being Ako, and I flashed once more upon that scene in the hut all those years ago. Shouldn't have done, really; by now I was sure this had to do with that bad magic.  
The hangar doors slid back, with an ominous low rumble, and I accustomed my eyes to the darkness within. It was not as hard to do this in England with its low grey autumn light as it would have been in Africa.   
There was the largest single space I'd ever seen; echoing and lit from above by yellow light that shafted and pooled in the dark; an orange tractor; and two aircraft.  
The one to the left was a propellor-driven 'plane, its canopy covered by a cloth.  
The one to the right, however, and it was this that the little group of Africans walked towards, was a twin-jet 'plane, a far bigger machine indeed; standing proud upon a double nosewheel and twin mainwheels, a pure white aircraft with a scarlet line along the side. Wide wings led to peculiar wingtip fins, and the tailfin with its high-mounted tailplane reached more than half the way to the rafters. There were no inscriptions on its side other than a marking on the engine pod - C8-ATN.  
Now that's familiar, I thought. The bush pilots' aircraft, those that were based at Kolokolo, usually had serials beginning with C8-, a sequence assigned to Alako. This suggested what I'd already guessed; this was an Alakut aircraft and if that was so, it was taking me home.  
The aircraft was already being towed out, one of the Africans fastening the orange tractor to the nosewheel by a long cable and driving off slowly.  
"Our carriage awaits," said Terrie, as the 'plane's door opened and a staircase unfolded itself to the ground. "Shall we?"


	7. Chapter 7

DNA profiling from the truck read that neither of the Africans from the squat in Shepherds Bush had been in there, but - pay dirt! - DNA matching a sample of Sam Tallu's hair was recovered from hair on one of the head-restraints.  
"He's been there," Heather said.  
"Splendid," Evans said. "Now all we need to do is find the Citroen they went off in. And preferably them in it." She marched out, head high. It was just a matter of time now, she decided, although the car hadn't been spotted. She focussed on the desired outcome: picturing finding the boy and the girl safe and well, and delivering the villains nicely handcuffed to a police cell.  
There might have been no point in thinking about the alternatives, but they were there: the dead bodies locked in the boot of a car, the shootout in a tower block, and so on. It was problematic, to say the least, when you couldn't just go in and give everyone a good kicking but had to make sure one or more of the people you were after was rescued safely.  
Two dead people associated with the case already. There was no evidence, certainly; but A10, the complaints unit, were already sniffing around the mysterious death in custody, and they had the power to suspend an officer from all duties, remove her warrant card, and if necessary lock her up like a common criminal until their investigation was finished.  
Then there was Mr James Ray 'Jack' Chandler.  
He was supposed to be helping with the case and the best you could say for that was that he wasn't overstepping the mark, trying to tell her how to do her job, and basically behaving like he was Sherlock Holmes. That happened quite a lot with 'expert' witnesses. He was currently on his way home and thence to Jericho School, where she was quite prepared to believe he was a very good teacher, even if some of his personal habits weren't what you would really want to pass on to teenagers. She knew very well that if she came the hard line and said something like,  
"Prostitution exists because of people like you!"  
He'd just look at her and say,  
"And grocers exist because people buy vegetables. Your point being?" He'd probably get in before her to say that he didn't buy ten-quid blowjobs off junkies around Kings Cross, but paid women a respectable amount for their company, and if that included sex, so be it.   
She stood in front of the map and drew a line from the school to the village of Monks Wellow, and the farm; looked at the big colour pictures of the farm and the abandoned car; and then followed the route of the tyre tracks, followed them out, south and west, through a wooded area and out along several roads at once - following routes in virtual, like she was here, she could expand her universe so it included all possibilities and then collapse the probability wave when a new factor entered it.  
Like the airfield at Long Hutton, fifty kilometres down the A3290.  
Christ, they could do it, couldn't they? They could be planning to take him out of the country. Since the attacks on the USA in September 2001, airspace violations were treated very seriously - not, of course, that those attacks had taken place in the UK, but, the alleged logic seemed to be, they could have. Even so, there was still no requirement for any private aircraft's crew to file a flight plan, and there was thus no reason why it couldn't take off from a UK airfield and go all the way to Alako. Because that was exactly where they'd be going, surely.  
How far, exactly? And how long would it take? And what kind of aircraft would it need? Bugger it, she'd have to call in outside help on this one, without making it too obvious what she was looking for.  
Long Hutton, she discovered, wasn't even permanently staffed. There was no reply when she phoned the only number she could find for it. Next she made a call to an old flame of hers who still worked in the Aviation Crime Unit.  
"West Africa," Sergeant Dean Lewis said. "Alako. Do we know what they're using?"  
"Nope," Cordelia said. "What could it be?"  
"Something that can take off from an unstaffed field," Lewis said, "which narrows it down. Some business jet, maybe. No prop job would get that far unless it stopped to refuel; it would depend what they thought was more of a risk, being stopped when they make a stopover or being spotted leaving our airspace in the sort of bird that you only see once a day. Besides, they'd want to get there fairly quickly, which suggests a jet again."  
"Assume that, then," Cordelia said. Dean had a habit of researching all possibilities very carefully, which was a good thing for a copper, she supposed, but infuriating in a partner, which was largely why he was an ex-partner; and possibly why he was still only a Sergeant, happy where the research was intricate, not where decisions needed to be made quickly.  
"Six thousand seven hundred kilometres," he said eventually. "Assuming a thousand km/h cruise and no noticeable head- or tailwind, as it's due south, six and two thirds hours. They'll be there in time for breakfast."  
"Right," said Cordelia, feeling not a little deflated. Could it be that easy? Could they get away that easily? No, she thought. They couldn't. And they wouldn't.   
"Is there any way we can stop them?" she asked. "if it's too late to stop them on the ground? Like, asking the RAF to scramble a fighter after them?"  
"You could ask," Lewis said, "but they'd say no. They'd tell you it costs £20,000, or some such figure, even before their 'plane was off the ground. If we aren't looking at a 9-11 situation they'd say it wasn't a clear and present danger. There's also the risk to the people onboard the 'plane and those on the ground if things got out of hand. Remember what happened in Ohio, last year. There was no threat, but a hundred people died because a trigger-happy F-15 pilot opened fire on a Colombian airliner that he thought was aiming for a Federal building. Turned out it was lost because its sat nav systems were on the blink.   
"They'd also suggest you call the local police at the other end and ask them to handle it. Say, this is about that boy, isn't it? The one who was taken from the school?"  
"I can't comment," Evans replied. "Thanks, Dean. I'll see you."  
"Sure. Any time, Cordelia. See ya."

***

Driving home, through the late evening rain, Chandler followed the nosing line of traffic under the northern edge of Moreford. He'd gone in to the police station by car because of the foul weather, and sitting here, in the car, he was ducted under the town through a route designed by city planners who'd had more of an idea than they had in other parts. The town centre was largely free from traffic, and as a result had predominantly kept its market-town character, with activity clustered around the old Wool Market, a holdover from the days when this was a major centre for the wool trade, clothiers descending from London itself meeting merchants driving up from the farming communities of the South. Nowadays the market square still served a function, hosting stalls selling meat and fruit and vegetables and dry goods; and the half-dozen pubs round the square, many with appropriate names - the Lamb, the Comb and Shears, the Fleece - fed and watered sellers and buyers alike. But that was a little way to the south, and now he was sitting in flicker-lit darkness listening to the radio.  
"Well, I remember this song from the 1980s," said a caller, "but I live in France now -"  
"Then why don't you," the show host interrupted, "fuck off and listen to French radio instead?" The interrupt segued to a half-forgotten tune; only half forgotten, because Jack Chandler could pre-empt every chord, every bass line, every vocal.  
Did I really hear that? Chandler wondered. He'd occasionally wondered when someone would allow themselves to say something like that on air. Of course, yadda yadda, people had the right to live wherever they chose, which was why he lived where he did, but that didn't mean you couldn't have an opinion about people who went to live in the old colonial power (1066 and all that: if the only date school-children remember is one of a defeat, we should have some attitude towards the people who defeated us, killed our leaders, warped our language, and imposed a class system that had resonances to this day) and still phoned in to English radio shows. It wasn't the same attitude as that of the Irish community in England, who still held to Ireland as their home, just that they weren't living there at the moment. Why could allegedly English people swanning about Europe get away with saying things like "England's the last place I'd go" to television interviewers, without getting at least their car tyres slashed, and preferably a good hard on-air pasting?  
He knew how he would sound to the outside world, but never mind.  
Every time I express an opinion that differentiates me from a Politically Correct Blairite yes-man, people call me a fascist.  
The car, behind a stream of others holding a steady twenty-four miles per hour - why do we still use miles? Chandler thought, this thought being in no way contradictory to his earlier ones - broke into daylight once more like a tunnelling naked mole rat. He drove round the one-way system and onto the Richmond Road, picking up speed behind a white van on its way north.  
Maybe he shouldn't have left the police station, he thought. Perhaps he should be there now, taking as long as it took to sort out what was going on with the kidnapping and the pictures on the wall. Liberate tutame ex feris? What, he wondered, was being called upon in that phrase? A person reading it, or something else. And if it was supposed to read Liberate tutame ex inferis, then was it calling something from Hell? Something that was supposed to stay there? He had a horrible feeling he knew what it was, or had an idea.  
The Ukolo manuscript, from what he'd translated of it, was no mere library of superstitions, but an apparently carefully worked out schematic revealing that not only were there inhabitants of other solar systems, but showing a way of summoning them. Easy travel between different worlds.  
Was that what they wanted to liberate itself from Hell?  
He rather suspected it was. There was no problem telling the Detective Inspector that, couching it in the kind of language that suggested he didn't believe a word of it, but it was likely that some other people did. After all, we were living in the kind of world where people not only dug up beliefs that nobody had held for five thousand years, but also threatened to kill anyone who didn't treat those beliefs with sufficient reverence. Most pagans, for thus they would have labelled themselves, took their beliefs seriously but not to the point of fundie intransigence, and also were quite prepared to admit that - in the case of Celtic paganism and Wicca - the structure of the Craft was largely invented by Gerald Gardner and the two Crowleys (Aleister and Vivienne), in the twentieth century. Some didn't, though.  
The Ukolo manuscript drew on a different tradition, and it wasn't even Yedjé, the benign paleopagan faith of the Ako people, which he'd read a fair bit about and discussed at length with Sam, who wasn't that knowledgeable but found it interesting. It looked like Yedjé, but the oldtime religion of the Ako certainly didn't talk about human women being impregnated by insectile aliens nor starheaded worms.  
"Oh … shit," was all he could say. Approaching 821 Richmond Road, he could see a car parked outside it. A white Toyota. A figure was running towards it and dumping something into the boot. There was another figure behind the wheel; the getaway driver, Chandler thought.  
The house's front door was open, smashed in, and two more figures were handing stuff out through the door. Somewhere among the figures something red was flickering, something with too many limbs which stood a head taller than the humans. There was a crash and the front window fell out into the front yard - the people inside the house were handing more things out, papers and books.  
"Bloody Christ," Chandler added, furious, but also terrified, seeing that red figure, and knowing somewhere deep inside, what it was. He swerved the car so it clipped the wing mirror of the Toyota. At once the Toyota's lights came on, its horn sounded, and it pulled out after him. A block away it overtook and stopped by the kerb. The driver's door opened.  
Chandler didn't wait, just drove round the opening door and gunned the engine, slotting in behind a blue car on the way north. The blue car's driver responded with a blast of horn.  
"Fuck off," Chandler said, "this is an emergency."  
A few seconds later he glanced into the wing mirror and saw the Toyota behind him, two cars back. He hung a fast left into Blucher Street and sped down towards the river. God don’t let me hit anything. Or anyone.  
The Toyota was still there in his rear view mirror. He hung another left, the tyres squealing their mechanical anger, into a narrow street he knew of, along the back of the old warehouses that lined the river frontage. It was a long, straight street, and there was no traffic, only a pile of cardboard boxes just by the turn, too close to avoid.  
The boxes flew into the air and crashed like a breaking wave over the car before crashing to the ground; crisp packets and handbills fluttered in the car's wake. Chandler's rear view mirror was clear. The Toyota had missed the turning, and was nowhere to be seen.  
Minutes later, he pulled up outside the police station in a squeal of brakes. Chandler climbed out of the car, nerves buzzing and pulse pounding in his ears.  
A uniformed Constable observed him gravely, from beneath the brow of his helmet.  
"Who taught you to drive, sir?" he asked ponderously.  
"Evel Knievel," said Chandler, and thundered into the police station.  
"Who?" said the policeman, but Chandler was gone, through the still swinging doors.

***

"You mean to say," said the Queen, "that you've lost them. That you think they've gone back to Alako, but you can't even be sure of that."  
"We are reasonably sure," Evans said. "We would like the crew and passengers of their aircraft stopped when it reaches Alako." She looked at the chief of police, who avoided her gaze. Places like this, the Queen's hotel suite, always made Cordelia feel resentful; they were designed to impose themselves on the visitor and make those who had merely business there feel small.   
The Queen of the Ako faced the Detective Inspector with a cold stare.  
"We can do that," she said. "We can also check for ourselves if you are right."  
"Meaning?" said Evans.  
"We go there," Queen Hannah said. Doctor Tallu looked up in surprise, biscuit in hand. Evidently he hadn't been told of this development."  
"There's a Nigerian Oil Corporation Sukhoi leaving from Gatwick at half past midnight,'' she went on breezily, "heading for Abuja. Or it was until I called them up and persuaded them to divert it for us." She beamed. Evans suspected she beamed in the same way when she was about to have someone ... interrogated.  
"That's very good work," Evans said. "So you'll be heading off soon then?"  
"No," said the Queen. "We will. Don't you want an arrest? To see the boy and the girl freed, personally?"  
"They don't have to," said the Chief of Police, sourly; protecting his turf, Evans thought. She knew all about that.  
"I'd rather you were able to come," said conciliatory Albert Tallu.  
This, thought Cordelia Evans, will put a flea up the bum of the Chief Commissioner.  
Or they'll make me a Chief Inspector for this. I'm in London, and the trail's getting weaker, and all this time the nappers will be sitting out there in the jungle getting stronger. Now I'm in England I want to be in Alako, and when I'm out there I'll want to be back here.  
She looked up.  
"I love the smell of jet fuel in the morning," she said. "It's that smell, that gasoline smell. It smells like ... nicking villains.  
"I'm in."


	8. Chapter 8

By the time the police got to the airfield, there was only a niff of burnt fuel, and the open hangar doors, to tell them their bird had already flown.   
Alerted to watch for a business jet leaving UK airspace on a flightpath due South, the Air Traffic Control at West Drayton tracked fifteen separate likely targets across Southern England, of which one seemed likely; responding to ATC with the callsign N2969BR, an impossible though superficially plausible US registration (four numbers can be followed by one or no letters, not two), it nonetheless followed procedures immaculately, and by the time ATC were wise to it, it was too late to demand it land in the UK; it was hightailing it at 12,000 metres and a good proportion of the speed of sound, out over the Bay of Biscay.  
"Burning more money than the country owns. I mean the country it's heading for," said Cordelia Evans, in the front passenger seat of a police Ford heading down an orange-lit Surrey motorway towards the airport, on the border of Surrey and the next county, Sussex.  
In the back seat, Jack Chandler sat and stared out at the passing world.   
"You have to admit," Evans said, "You weren't expecting this when you woke up this morning." The car had slowed behind a truck in the outside lane, which moved over sharpish when the car sprouted a flashing blue light and a siren. Chandler, despite his tiredness and his rage over the toerags who'd trashed his gaff, felt that surge of boyish excitement again, though naturally, he thought, it was all part of the job for Evans, who looked like a motherly nurse or teacher herself, certainly not a hardbitten cop. It just showed appearances could be deceptive. The camera eroticises the space, he remembered from Spalding Gray's "Swimming to Cambodia". That and Perfect Moments, though standing on the beach at Ao Nang, looking into the hot blue distance like he expected a spacecraft to rise from the waves, he (Chandler) had been accused of looking for Perfect Moments on purpose. In this situation, this here and now, boys (different Island), the fluorescent jam sandwich with flashing blue light conferred an illusion of invulnerabilty. Unfortunately Gray never got back to Cambodia, and drowned in New York years later, run out of Perfect Moments; and who knew when the magic space this detachment of the Moreford police had built around themselves might pop like a carnival balloon? They've done it before, he told himself; but chasing villains from continent to continent couldn't be a very common occurrence in the life of a suburban police unit. It was eleven fifty-nine by the car's red LED clock.

"Look at it this way," Chandler said as the Sukhoi lined up for takeoff, "if we do crash and burn we'll be immortalised in a thousand spam emails. People will be telling stories of the twenty million US dollars we all left in a convenient bank account, for years." The three white-robed Nigerian passengers, already palpably put out by the arrival of two Westerners and three Alakuts - two of whom seemed large enough to detract from the 'plane's performance - were distinctly frosty about this comment.  
The howl of the engines rose and the 'plane began its takeoff roll. It wasn't a spacious cabin, not with the extra bodies aboard; much of the Sukhoi S-21's length was taken up by fuel tanks for the three engines, which would propel the aircraft to a Mach 1.8 cruise between the South Coast and Africa.  
At that rate they might even overtake the fugitives.  
Then it was like being shoved in the back up a flight of stairs, as the aircraft sped down the runway and got airborne, lights on the ground tilting away beneath them, the disorientation of the night-time takeoff.  
The Nigerians were praying. Chandler would have, if he had thought it would help, but not for the flight but for what they might find at the other end.  
He had the briefcase with the drawings, photographs and translations beneath his seat; a plush leather-upholstered seat it was too, all the comfort of an expensive car, and a minibar for the use of the handful of occupants. Chandler helped himself to an orange juice while the others picked out miniatures of scotch and brandy. Out of the porthole windows he could see only frosty black lit by a few distant yellow and white lights, and in the distance a ragged, spectral veil of whitish cloud, lit by a crescent moon. The aircraft now was travelling too fast to be noisy inside, the Mach meter at the front of the cabin reading 1.2 and gaining continually. The Nigerians were busying themselves with low conversation at the front of the cabin, and the Queen and her Chief of Police were deep in discussion behind them. Doctor Tallu was asleep; Chandler could hardly blame the fat man, it was well past one in the morning and normally he'd have crawled off to bed by now as well.  
"Enjoying yourself?" DI Evans asked.  
"Just thinking," Chandler said. "I wonder if the people who broke into my house weren't looking for the translation. What if they were after something else?"  
"Such as?"  
"I don't know," he said. "I didn't spot anything missing after the first raid. The second time, though, they were really taking it apart. That's why I drove off." That and the thing I saw in the house, he thought.  
"I sent a couple of coppers round," Evans said. "They've sealed the house off."  
"And they didn't find anything … untoward?"  
"Well, if they did they didn't tell me before we took off. A bit late now; can't use mobile phones in here."  
"Even if we assume none of the weird shit the bad guys believe in is real," Chandler said, "I think they're trying to raise something, and the obvious place for them to do it isn't in England, but in Alako where it originated. If the Ukolo manuscript came from there originally, that is."  
"It did," came the Queen's voice clearly from the seats in front.  
"There," Chandler said. "You heard her Majesty." The Queen stood up and swayed down the aircraft, the top of her hairdo brushing the cabin ceiling. She sat in one of the unoccupied seats in front of Chandler and Evans.  
"I think," Evans said, "your Majesty might like to brief us a little on what we're likely to find there."  
"If they are playing toy necromancers," Chandler said. "And if they believe the ua can be summoned and incarnated in a human form."  
He waited for the Queen to look shocked, but it didn't work. She sat staring balefully at him.  
"That's what it's about, isn't it?" Chandler said.   
"The ua," he said for Evans's benefit, "are demons believed in by people who follow a rogue strand of Yedjé called Malembé. Most of the Ukolo manuscript is about the ua. If it's a work of science fiction it's a mightily detailed one and is ahead of everything written in the West along those lines by a matter of centuries. Besides, it isn't very strong on plot, and a lot stronger on the care and feeding of possible ua - human hybrids."  
"And you tell us this now?" Evans said.  
"If anyone's going to try anything here," Chandler said, pointing to the walls and ceiling and floor of the aircraft, and the iceblack world twenty kilometres below, "we're all dead."  
"They might not care," said Evans, gloomily. She looked out of the window.  
"Well," said the Queen, "you have nothing to fear from me, and," she lowered her voice, "my Chief of Police has already relieved one of the Nigerian gentlemen of his sidearm."  
"He has?" Evans exclaimed, indignant. "When?"  
"Just before take-off," the Queen said. "He did it very subtly, but the gentleman involved is not an official law enforcement operative…" she smiled. "Il n'est pas flicard. He is not a cop, so he is not entitled to carry a weapon aboard an aircraft, and a Walther .303 does, I believe, count as a weapon. Though as Mr Chandler points out, if he were to use it here we would all be in the bosom of the gods. No no, I believe all three of our Nigerian friends to be honest, but I will not have armed men aboard unless they are for my protection, and the Chief of Police is."  
"And is he tooled up as well?" Chandler asked, despairingly.  
"Tooled up? Oh la la, j'ai compris. Yes, he is carrying a small ceramic-bodied machine pistol. It has a negligible signature through airport security apparatus."  
"And he was carrying that," Evans said, "while he was in England?"  
"Yes, of course… naturellement …"  
"You do know he could have got five years for that? He could even have got himself shot, if he was waving it about?"  
"Pouf, yes," the Queen said. "I have noticed this. First of all the British police do not carry weapons at all, and then suddenly it is submachine guns. What is wrong with a pistol in a holster, I ask. It will put a hole in someone if needs be, and normalement it can be kept out of the way. But no, they must carry these enormous things slung across themselves and make everybody, even the law-abiding, feel threatened. They have no subtlety!" She raised her hands in horror.  
"You like subtlety," said Chandler. "Don't you?"  
"Yes," said the Queen after a moment, "except for myself!" She guffawed.  
"Anyway," she continued, "you ask me what I think we shall find there. I must in all honesty say that I do not know. I know I have my critics - indeed, some say that I have my critics silenced. But I do not worship, and never have worshipped, at the altar of the ua. I do not practice the malembé.  
"The malembé is the dark path," the Queen said. "The path of the night." She, too, looked out of the window, at the darkness outside, where a vast distance below there was a pattern of lights, some sea coast, probably Spain or Portugal, sliding past, getting the edge of the Sukhoi's sonic boom.  
"Because in the day," she went on, in a low voice, unlike her own, "you can only see the sky. At night you can see all the light of the Universe. Only at night will those who watch for the ua see them approach."  
Only, Chandler thought bitterly, remembering that red thing in his house: the huge eyes, the quivering mandibles and the multiple arms glimpsed in a split second: they are already here.

Alako in the early morning light was red, and brown, and yellow; an expanse of arid land behind a cluster of white buildings where they had been lodged. Chandler woke up with a head sorer than he'd ever had since he gave up the drink, blinking, wondering where he was and hearing a bird chattering in the branches outside the window.  
He got up, walked to the window, pulled up the blinds. Outside, where the manicured front patio of the house led to the red and brown and yellow, a black woman in an orange dress, her hair bound up in a scarlet cloth, was sweeping the dust away. He tried to puzzle out the shape on her back until he realised she was carrying a baby, wrapped in a white sling that went round the woman's body, its brown head lying asleep on its mother's neck, sleeping as she swept. Remembering he was naked, he let the blinds fall back down.  
He'd slept through the later part of the flight, letting the distant thunder of the engines lull him, and remembered waking on the descent; being met at the airport - where there was no sign of the aircraft they were chasing - and ushered into an official car taking the Queen, the Consort and the Chief of Police back to the Palace. Then there was a drive through the night, as Alako slept, though shortly after they left the airport, the night was torn apart as the Sukhoi took off, roaring, continuing its journey towards Nigeria.   
Chandler and Evans had been billeted here, on the outliers of the Palace, in the guest lodge, though a very fine lodge it was; the room had a polished stone floor and red-ochre walls, a comfortable double bed with an ornate iron head, and a washbasin, shower and toilet behind a screen. It really was all he needed.  
Well, that and not to be chasing halfway across the world into the mouth of something he didn't really want to think about. Men with guns would have been frightening enough; men with guns backed up with the ua and, well, somebody peed my pants.

***

All through the flight, the men and the woman with us were nearly silent, chewing gum, drinking water, occasionally passing us water, though if we asked for anything we were ignored. When I got up to go to the toilet one of the black men pointed a gun at me. Even I knew that if he fired it in there he'd rupture the fuselage and we'd all spill out into the cold black air and splat into the ocean like it was concrete, miles below; but maybe, it occurred to me, he didn't know that. I'd occasionally been curious whether someone falling out of an aircraft without a 'chute was conscious by the time they hit the ground, but I had no intention of finding out first-hand.   
But Ivan put his arm round my shoulder and said,  
"Toilet?"  
I nodded, and he shepherded me to the cubicle at the back of the 'plane.  
I sat in there miserably, head in hands, unable to piss for ages, it seemed, but Ivan didn't knock on the door. I mean, it was hardly likely I was going to try to escape, now was it? I looked around me; it was sparse even compared with the toilet in the 767 that had brought me to England. Just a hole in a plastic moulding, a chemical flush, a tiny washbasin and a mirror.  
I grimaced at myself.  
"It could be worse," I told my reflection, though I doubted if even my reflection believed it. I looked haggard, I thought; now either that was the stress of the kidnapping or the exertions of young Terrie, I wasn't sure.  
Terrie seemed to be taking it even worse than I was. When I finally flushed the bog and staggered out into the cabin, as though I'd been taking drugs in there - I'd seen the choicest films during my time at Jericho - Terrie was pale and shaking, crying very slowly, sitting pressed against the cabin wall as though it would protect her. Ivan was ignoring her but one of the African men was staring at her. I thought about talking to him but, considering it was the one who thought it was a clever idea to threaten someone with a gun in a pressurised cabin, I didn't. Instead I sat down next to Terrie and slipped a hand and then the arm around her shoulders from behind, pressed her to me. She put her hand in my other hand in my lap, and looked round at me and smiled.  
The hormones were working, even here. I was becoming erect as I sat there, despite everything. But when I thought about the African staring at us, the erection subsided.  
"Where are they taking us?" she whispered.  
"Home," I told her. "We're going home."  
"Your home," she said.  
"You always wanted to see it," I suggested. She looked away, a curtain of hair hiding her face. Eventually she got up in turn, and went to the toilet. She took longer in it than I had, and finally the African woman knocked on the door and asked if she was allright.  
When Terrie came outside she looked even more distraught than before. She whispered something to the African woman, and the two of them went for'ard, just behind the cockpit door, where there was more whispering. I wondered what that was all about. The woman was holding her hands and nodding as Terrie said something; then it looked as though she was counting on her fingers. She patted Terrie's stomach, and her nutbrown face creased into a smile, but Terrie didn't share it. She looked at me, and there was nothing but despair in her look.  
Oh fuck, I thought, making the connection eventually, as though it hadn't taken me long enough. True, at first I thought maybe she needed a Tampax, but now I realised that wasn't it; it couldn't be it. Quite the reverse. I knew it wasn't a good idea, all the sex we'd had without a condom.  
Terrie was pregnant.  
I suddenly felt even more protective, and also very afraid. Fuck it, I wanted to say, I'm fifteen, I've been kidnapped by armed guerrillas, and my girlfriend's up the duff. But I didn't. One look from the man opposite told me it would be a very bad idea. Then again, it didn't look like Terrie was very happy about it. As the sex education teachers at Jericho always said, you have plenty of time to be a parent.  
Then again and again, even if I did make it out into normal life back in Alako, if Terrie gave birth I'd lose my nuts. The Queen was quite definite about this. Fathers under the age of seventeen are for the snip, and not just vasectomy either. I could feel my balls trying to crawl back up into my body at the thought of it. No, it was wrong, I wanted to yell at the Queen if I ever saw her again; you can't do this to me! You Have No Right (the usual cry of people who've been outnumbered, outclassed, and outgunned, or so Jack Chandler would have said. I was beginning to think maybe he was wrong). How could it be right to cut people off in their prime? It had to be some jealous man who'd instituted that law, someone who didn't have any children of their own.  
Well, I could worry about that if I survived, I thought. I looked at the three men, all of them with the same curled horizontal scars on their cheeks, and learnt nothing from their war-inured features. These would have been the same men who fought the war in Cameroon and kept the west coast of Africa ablaze for years. If not the same men, the same type. The woman looked no less hard, despite her caring for Terrie, and she had the same scars.  
For some reason I suddenly felt lighter. I knew I shouldn't. Some really heavy shit was going down.   
After a while I realised what it was. We had begun our descent.

The 'plane touched down on a dark runway; and things were going to get even darker. As we taxied to a stop the soldiers closed the covers over the portholes. I assumed we'd landed at Kolokolo, but it looked like they wanted to stop us finding out.  
The door opened and the stairs folded down. The gunman gestured at me to get up and walk facing backwards down the stairs. That way I could only see the stairs and the aircraft. Above me, Terrie was facing into the aircraft, standing in the door.   
We were backed into a vehicle, something that smelled of steel and oil, one of the Land Rovers that get used everywhere in Alako, for roads where normal cars would fall to bits. The rear of this Land Rover was enclosed so we couldn't see out.  
I tried to smile at Terrie and she tried to smile back at me, but she was obviously as terrified as me. Ivan got into the rear compartment with us and the African woman; the three African men were in the front seat. The engine started up and we began a long, bumpy ride.  
I supposed I should have been glad to be back in Alako; it smelt right, even the stink of oil in the truck; the bumping of the road was right, and the smells I could detect outside, the vegetation and the dust. I wondered what Terrie was feeling, though. This was no home for her. I also wondered what Ivan and his friends wanted with her, as well as me, and whether they would let her go now they knew she was pregnant; the woman must have told the men, surely, and given them some kind of instruction as to what to do and how to behave themselves around the girl, pregnancy and childbirth being entirely women's domain, at least in our society.

In silence, they offloaded us from the truck. Even before they opened the doors I could tell we were inside something; the echoes were wrong for the open air. No business about climbing out backwards here; we were handed down from the truck into a dark redlit space by the men, who seemed more relaxed here, and even the gunman looked like he might be willing to swap a joke with us rather than small-arms fire. One of them lit a cigarette and another said something that I didn't catch. It wasn't Asanti, nor Kilolo, and it wasn't any Ako I knew. Soldiers' slang perhaps. Ivan was with them, standing a little to the edge of the group, perhaps not quite included among them, as a foreigner, but then the woman said something to him and he laughed and replied in that same strange half-Ako tongue, and took her hand.  
Beyond the redlit space I could see stars, and the silhouette of a tree. The world was quiet; somewhere in the very far darkness came the snarling cough of a leopard, hunting whatever creatures were desperate or foolish to be about in the darkness.  
Then something mechanical creaked and the outside world was cut off, slowly, from the top down, and the lights came up around us.  
I don't think I said anything. Just gasped. We were in a cavern, redbrown rock walls reaching several man-heights above us, galleried with wooden platforms. The opening to the outside world was blocked off with a metallic door. The floor was rock, but had been cut and chiseled until it was almost smooth.  
The lights were powerful arc lamps, mounted in clusters high up on the gantries, and they cast black shadows on the rock, unmoving shadows.   
One of the soldiers took me by the shoulder and drew me to the far wall, showing me something in the rocks. I could see a white curve; possibly the tooth of some long-dead carnivore, perhaps a sabretooth cat. Near it someone had painted black figures, grasping spears, chasing a buffalo up the curve of the tooth. The figures were simply drawn, but expressive; they spoke movement. They looked as though they had been there for centuries, and probably had, worn into the patina of the rock. People had lived here, then, before, or at least used it for rituals, or for teaching; probably the figures of men and buffalo were drawn by some old hunter, been after buffalo all his life, teaching the youngsters how to hunt:   
"You track him like so, follow a slow one from the edge of the herd. Then one of you, the quick one, comes up like so alongside with the spear, only don't let the bull get his horns round to face you or you'll be looking at your own guts."  
I could almost see the wide-eyed lads, gathered round the drawing, and the old man - probably all of thirty years of age - slowing down now, anxious to pass on his knowledge while there was time, and wondering if next time he went out he'd not be quick enough to escape the horns, or if a lion would take him.  
We don't have lions any more, in Alako. French weekend hunters did for them during a seventy-year reign of terror that only ended when Alako became independent in 1960. But there are still leopards, and buffalo, and the white egrets that perch on their backs.  
In those days the buffalo would have been a living carpet on the plains, thundering past in their thousands, churning the waterholes to a slick of mud - creatures sacred to Chango, such was the thunder of their hooves, and as such the hunters would dedicate the kill to the god and apologise to the spirit of the beast when they'd killed it.  
One of the human figures was drawn large enough that it had a simple face: curly hair, ears, a round nose, eyes, and a mouth; and on the cheek of that face were two horizontal lines, curving towards each other at the tips. I looked back at the soldier. He took my finger and drew it along the lines on the stick-man's face, and then along the scars on his own cheek; looked at me as though I could understand what he meant.  
"You are home," he said gently, in Ako. "You are home."  
Home, in a secret cavern with a Russian mercenary, a squad of Alakut soldiers and my pregnant girlfriend.   
Home, in Africa.

***

Unknown to Jack Chandler, Detective Inspector Cordelia Evans hadn't been asleep the way he had. Striking while the iron was at least reasonably cool, the policewoman had returned after an hour's sleep, restless, gone back to the airport, where she'd found the hangar doors open – like the stone rolled away, she thought, and no business jet answering the description she would have had of the plane that took Sam, the girl, and the kidnappers to Africa. However, asking around proved more successful. The airport buildings were all but deserted, but she found herself up to air traffic control, such as it was, a single room above the concrete arrivals hall.  
The man in charge, scarcely taller than her, dressed in khaki shorts and a white T-shirt, constantly chewing something; first of all she wondered if he'd understood what he asked her. But he did speak English, she was relieved to find out, unwilling to try her not-particularly-good French on him.  
"Two planes in the night," he said eventually. "The second one; well, that's the one you came on. The first one, though, also coming from Europe. What did they do? It took off an hour later, just before you arrived."  
Damn it, Cordelia thought. "We just missed them."  
"it is true," the man said. "But they drove away. In a Land Rover."  
"You saw this?"  
"Of course," he said, a hand-spreading gesture. "I watched them. Two young people, four African soldiers – one a woman – and a white man. The white man seemed to be far more protective of the young people."  
"And they were – the young people, I mean?" she gestured, go on.  
"A boy, African, probably one of ours. And a young mam'zelle, a white girl, but darkhaired, very pretty, but she looked very sad."  
"And where did they go? Can you say where they might have gone?"  
"Up towards the hills," the man said. "It is strange, because most people will head for the capital, or for Ukolo. They headed inland, as though they were going to the Wall or to the mountains. I think that is where they have gone. It was dark, you understand, I could not see much, but because there were no aircraft expected until yours, I watched as they left."  
"Did you," Cordelia asked, not expecting any kind of result from this question, "get the registration number of the Land Rover?"  
"No," the man said with a wry smile. "That I did not do. It was too far away. However, I can tell you it was a white Land Rover with an enclosed rear. The young people were put into the rear of it. Perhaps so they could not see where they were going."  
"Thankyou," Cordelia said. "You've been very helpful, Mr – "  
"Sanaoui," the man said. "Call me Gilbert." Zhilbair, like Bécaud.  
"Thankyou, Gilbert," Cordelia said, and left.

Raising the Chief of Police wasn't hard; does he ever sleep? She wondered, as he appeared at her door fully and impeccably dressed, in answer to her phone call a mere ten minutes before, and accompanied by an interpreter.  
"I live in the Palace buildings," he said. Don't you just, Cordelia thought. This place is beginning to look more and more like a hive complex. Her quarters abutted a high ochre wall, and in that wall she could see small windows. Occasionally people passed by them, or mounted the half-exposed staircases.  
"I need," Cordelia said, "a detachment of police to come with me to the mountains. I believe the kidnappers have gone there, up the trail the opposite direction from ourselves."  
"I see," said Colonel Abdou. "I shall send someone. You will be working with Lieutenant Jennegh on this case. He is one of my most trusted. He will call for you in thirty minutes. Is that sufficient?"  
"Quite," Cordelia said. I can always sleep later, she told herself, though fatigue was beginning to slow her and she started to keep a definite watch on whatever she was saying. You never knew what might come out in a situation like this. "Thankyou."  
Lieutenant Jennegh was a thin, sandy-looking man, as though years of living and working out in the desert had given him protective colouring. He arrived with four of his policemen, all dressed in brown camouflage fatigues and carrying machinepistols. They all looked at Cordelia appraisingly; she had a feeling it was going to be one of those situations, the men would all take orders from Jennegh and treat her as a piece of operational totty. She had to make sure the parameters were set out. She also very definitely did not want it to all end in bloodshed; she'd seen the way some people who weren't used to weapons used them, eyes closed, grinning like loons and spraying bullets like a tomcat, and it would be very, very dangerous if there was anyone like that about. Dangerous to your own side, that was, not the enemy who'd stand there enjoying the show and then kill you. The best thing to do if there was someone like that on your side would be to blow his head off from behind. Then again she suspected the Alakut police might have an ounce or two of professionalism; they looked as though they, despite a welcoming absence of sergeant-majorly military bullshit, might have.  
"We're not carrying out a military operation here," said Cordelia, cautiously. "We want to find out where the nappers went and where they might be hiding out."  
"Sure," said Jennegh, nodding. "This man," he beckoned forward one of the four, "is tracker. Knows just where your people have gone." He spoke some rapidfire Ako at the man, who grinned and nodded.  
"Good," Cordelia said. "If he knows where, he can navigate for us. Let's go."

Of course it took no time at all for the news to get around the palace compound, being the kind of highly rigid, stratified society it was, with overtones of the harems of ancient Araby, where each knew his or her place and therefore needed to chatter with the others because there was no other way round a blockage like that. And what the news said was, the Consort's son is being held somewhere in the mountains, and an expedition is going off just as we speak here, just as we drink mint tea and watch the sun come up over the mountains, a red blaze in the gap between those hills there, an expedition to bring him back, and his girlfriend.  
Lucine Bologo was having breakfast with her mother. The girl had become quiet these last days, since she heard that her sort-of boyfriend had been taken prisoner, and even more so when she found out he was accompanied by a girl.  
"I knew it," she told her mother. "I knew he'd find someone else in England. I bet she's a white girl as well."  
"Maybe it's for the best, child," her mother said, though Lucine didn't believe a word of it. She had at least that to believe in; that Samuel would come back and they'd be married.  
"You are a bit young to marry," Lucine's mother went on.  
"You were married at thirteen," Lucine pointed out. "Besides, we could have waited. We could have been engaged for years. People do."  
"But that was in the old days," mother said. "And we didn't really … we didn't have Serge till I was twenty, and you came along two years later."  
And nowadays: well, now, mother was drinking coffee on the balcony of their small suite of rooms, a smaller flat by far than Dr Tallu's, but adequate. There were pieces of furniture imported from France, two large squishy sofas and a dining table with canebacked chairs, a piano that no longer got played, and a framed photograph of Lucine's brother Serge on top of it. Serge had been the pianist. Nobody talked much about Serge, but occasionally mother would get the photograph album out and leaf through it, smiling sadly when she came to pictures of her late son. A lot of the pictures were of military bent; Colonel Samson Bologo didn't live there any more, but his influence was felt all over the place. He and Mme Franciane Iyabo-Bologo weren't divorced, they just didn't live together.  
Lucine was sitting with her mum, but apart from a cup of coffee, not taking anything, certainly not helping herself to the warm rolls and honey on the table.  
"You have to eat, sweetheart," mum said. "You're fading away."  
Lucine took a roll and wandered with it, dry, back into her bedroom. She showered, got dressed, and tucked a book under her arm, wandered down into the courtyard.  
She was sitting under a tree, paging idly through her favourite subject, when she was aware of someone looking down at her. She squinted up, brushed hair from her face, and smiled hopefully. It was a white man, dressed in the ubiquitous visitor's uniform of white shirt and khaki shorts, looking down at her as though he half recognised her.  
"Excuse me," he said in French, "are you Lucine?"  
"That's me," Lucine said.  
"I'm Jack Chandler," said the man. "I'm Samuel's teacher, in England. Can I join you?"  
"Sure," said Lucine, slightly nonplussed. In her experience adults interrupted whenever they felt like it. Perhaps she was growing up a little and getting to the age where people did ask her permission.  
"I can tell Sam's got a talent," he said. "I mean for drawing. He showed me a drawing he'd made of you."  
"Oh," said Lucine. "Yes. They haven't found him yet, though, have they?"  
"There's an expedition went out this morning," Chandler said. "I saw them setting off." Which was only slightly an exaggeration; he'd heard it, and one of the cleaners had told him, presuming that any white person in the palace must have something to do with it; not wrongly, indeed. The woman had been sweeping up in the corridor and stopped him: a thin, middle-aged black woman, two horizontal scars on her cheeks, curving together at the ends. Once she'd told him, though, she went silent, as though she'd divulged more than she ought to.  
"Oh, good," Lucine said. "Is it true," she went on, "that he has a girlfriend in England?"  
"There's a girl with them," Chandler said. "I don't know she's his girlfriend. He didn't have one at Jericho. Your picture was on the wall of his room."  
"They will find him," Lucine said, "won't they? Why have they taken him?"  
"I don't think anybody knows," Chandler said. "But they'll find him. They're on the way, now." He stood up.  
"Nice talking to you, Lucine." As he walked off down the courtyard, Lucine watched him go and wondered if he knew that he was as lonely as her. She could feel it from him. Maybe she should try and introduce him to Mum, see if they'd get on together. They must be about the same age.

Chandler was hardly going to mention the Manuscript to her, though this was the girl, he knew, who'd introduced Sam to it, who might be at the root of all their trouble. But it was unlikely. By all accounts she was a credulous thing, willing to believe in any hokum; it was just that the Ukolo MS was something more than just a nut book. She'd been taken in by the weirdness of it, possibly without understanding what it meant.  
As he looked at her he saw something among the trees, something that wasn't just one of the peculiar animals that were wandering about – shaggy reddish-brown creatures with a long white-banded nose, like a hybrid of fox and badger, with long claws, which ambled about, chirping, and would occasionally group together in small clusters, climb up one of the trees and woof raucously. These were the coatimundis Sam had told him of, the Queen's personal population of the creatures, which originated in Central America and whose ancestors had been shipped in two decades or more ago. He suspected some of the odd chirpings he'd heard that morning weren't birds but these creatures.  
No, the coatis were innocent enough. What he'd seen among the trees was something else, an insectile red presence, taller than most men, brooding, the antennae waving slowly and fitfully. Even for that momentary glimpse he'd felt sickened.  
Another palace servant passed by and he noticed that, like the woman in the corridor this morning, he had two parallel scars on his cheek, looped at the ends. It looks familiar, Chandler thought. Something he'd seen in the Ukolo MS. The servant also seemed to be nervous, looking around himself, fidgeting, as though he was expecting something to happen, something bad, something which would involve him. Chandler wondered what was in that holdall he carried with him. He had a horrible feeling about this.  
Got to find the chief of police, he thought. Tell him. But first of all he walked over to Lucine and sat by her.  
"Lucine," he said quietly, "you'd better go inside and stay there."  
The girl looked at him, puzzled.  
"I think something's going to happen," he said. "There could be trouble. You're probably safer at home." Lucine, to her credit, said nothing, just nodded, got up and walked out of the courtyard. Maybe she's used to things like this, Chandler thought. Though I don't think anyone could be used to what may be about to happen.

As he stepped into the cool of the corridor, another of the servants brushed past him, and this one had, yet again, the two scars curving around one another at their ends. Worms, Chandler thought, bloody worms. That's what they are. Jesus! Worms! Oh yes, Jesus worms.  
The man looked even sweatier than the first one and as Chandler turned to look at him he opened the bag he was carrying and drew out … not a gun, as Chandler had been expecting, but a silvery flask, like a thermos.  
Chandler took two steps towards him, grabbed the man by the arm that was holding the canister, and said,   
"Give me that!"  
The man said,   
"Never!" and slipped the canister to the other hand, flung it into the courtyard. There was a small sound of breaking glass; the man was pinned against the wall, staring at Jack with open eyes.  
"What was it?" Jack demanded. "What does it do?"  
"He's coming," the man said, twisting in Jack's grip. "He's coming. You can't stop him now."  
"Who's coming?" Pushing him against the wall. His victim didn't put up any fight at all, but squirmed, trying to find a way out.  
"The Master …"  
Jack Chandler let him go and ran into the courtyard, where several people had crowded round the small silver thing, curiously.  
"It's a bomb!" Jack yelled. They looked up curiously.  
"A bomb! Une bombe! Va exploser!"  
He ran towards it, scooped up the silver thing, but the walls of the courtyard were so high. There was a curious smell in the air, a smell coming from the canister. Under the trees the coatimundis started screeching, chattering, swarmed up the trees to what they hoped was safety. Jack wasn't sure at all. Standing with the thing in his hand he cast about while everyone else in the courtyard ran for cover. Out of the corner of his eye he could see two uniformed figures, one slipping something long and black from his shoulder.  
That bastard's going to kill me in about three seconds.  
There was a grille; a grille in the floor with bars around a handspan apart. Fuck what's down there, Jack thought; it can't be worse than what would happen otherwise.  
He dropped the canister through the grille. There was a clattering from deep below, and a cry somewhere; Jack threw himself flat alongside the grille.  
A few seconds later – a few very long seconds later – he rolled over and looked up into the blazing sky, to see a black man in camo fatigues pointing a rifle at him.  
"Don't play with that," he said wearily. "It might be loaded."   
The man didn't react, and stayed pointing the rifle at him. His finger slipped through the trigger guard.  
Then a small figure arrived alongside the soldier, tapped him on the arm, and started talking to him in rapid-fire Ako. The soldier, nodding gravely, put up his rifle.  
It took a while to sink in. Lucine, still hanging around in the corridor, had seen everything. Another second and the soldier, believing Jack to be the bomber, would have shot him dead. But she'd told him what she'd seen: that he wasn't the bomber, he was getting rid of the bomb, making it safe. Dear Lucine, Jack thought. I think you've just saved my life.  
"You have," he said, getting up, "You've just saved my life, haven't you? Thankyou …"   
Then he turned to the soldier.  
"There are more of them," Jack said. "I noticed at least one."  
"I told you something was going to happen," Jack said, and putting an arm round Lucine's waist hurried her to cover. Boots thundered in the corridors; Colonel Abdou was on the scene, looking angry, understandably, Jack thought.  
There was a sharp crack from inside the building. Gunfire? Another canister came hurtling through the air, and landed on the tiled courtyard. It shattered and yellow gas began to rise from it. That sweet smell he'd noticed before was here again. The soldier raised his rifle and fired at the man with the blue holdall, who was lurking beneath a tree having thrown his canister. The bomber's upper body suddenly developed a pattern of red flowers and he flew through the air, crashing to ground on his back.  
People were falling to their knees, clutching their throats, coughing. Safer inside, or outside? Two more soldiers thundered past them where they lurked in an outer lobby of the palace. There was a shot and a scream, highpitched and wavering, that went on for twenty seconds or so, on and on, until there was a second shot and it stopped.  
There was a stink of cordite and blood in the air now, as well as the smell of the gas. Those nearest to it had already succumbed, lying contorted, while others tried to do something for them, and still more people were dragging themselves away from the courtyard where by now a half dozen clouds of yellow smoke were beginning to mix into one. There were more gunshots, a fusillade of them and then another, and another explosion.  
Jack, holding Lucine close beside him, looked out into the corridor.  
"All clear," he said. He followed his morning's path back, past closed doors and to a corner where he looked out again. That cleaner with the double scar was pushing a trolley full of cleaning equipment. As she saw them her eyes became wide and she reached into the trolley.  
"Don't," Jack said. "I know what this is about. You've lost."  
"No," said the cleaner, and produced a heavy silvery object which she turned and threw down the corridor. Then she smiled happily. Jack grabbed Lucine and ran back the way they'd came.  
The explosion followed them, tossing them up into the air, slamming them against the wall, and they came to a halt in a heap by a doorway.   
He looked at Lucine. Her eyes were shut and she was limp. As far as he could tell she wasn't breathing. He touched her cheek.  
"Lucine!"  
There was no reply. He lowered her to the ground. He was aching, covered in something wet; he looked down and saw that there was blood and meat covering him, but then investigating, saw also that it wasn't his, nor the girl's; the cleaning woman had spread herself about a bit.  
"Ugh," said a small voice. The girl was struggling up.  
"Lucine, I thought you were … can you walk?"  
"I hope so," she said. He helped her up and they began their journey once more. There were people staggering, weeping, falling over, and gunshots permeating the wailing and crying.

A large figure hove into view, walking towards them, dressed in black and gold traditional robes.  
"I say," said Albert Tallu. "Oh I say. This is all very terrible." He waddled towards them, wringing his hands. "My poor child," he said, reaching out for Lucine. He somehow looked less comical now, more a chief of his people, more what he really was - a good man caught up in somebody else's war.  
Then someone stepped out from the shadows by the lift; a camouflaged figure, a man of thirty or so, a white man, chunky and crophaired, his face not only scarred but painted with the parallel lines, twisted at the ends. In one hand he held a large black gun.  
"Shut it, fatman," he said. His accent was pure South London.  
"You must stop this," Tallu said. "This is barbarism. They're killing women … children …"   
"No," the man said. "This is the new world. Yours is over with."  
So saying, he raised the gun and shot Albert Tallu through the side of the head. Blood spattered across the wall and the elephantine body crumpled. Lucine screamed, then stopped abruptly, biting her lip.  
"You've … killed … him," she said.  
"So?" said the man. "He had it coming. Chocolate … biscuits. Bastard."  
"Who are you?" said Jack Chandler, though the man was increasingly familiar.  
"My name's Keefe. Don't you remember me?" the man said. "When we set you up with that Chinese whore. I thought it was such a shame we had to pass her on to you. Still, we had a good time with her as well. Not that she remembers."  
"She does," Chandler said, "and she could recognise you." So do I, he thought. I remember you barging through my front door. I seem to recall I outran you that time. No wonder you need a gun to do the job for you.  
"What is it all about?" Chandler asked. "It's a coup, isn't it? You're overthrowing the Queen. Then why did you break into my house?"  
"It isn't just a coup d'etat," Keefe said. "He promised us. The new world is coming."  
Somewhere there was another explosion, the walls shuddering faintly and a myriad tiny feet, disturbed, scurrying.  
"Suddenly we're in control," he said, smiling. "I ain't never felt that in years."  
"Control?" Chandler said. "You mean, you've given control to the ua."  
"How do you know that name?" Keefe demanded, waving his gun at Jack. "How do you know about … the ua?"  
"How do you think?" Chandler said. "You think I haven't always been fascinated by them? How do you know I don't worship them also? I had the translation, remember."  
Keefe stood pondering.  
"And what else was it you wanted?" Jack asked. "Why did you come back, raid my place?"  
"Oh," he said, "it was you, dickney. Didn't you realise?"  
"Me?"  
"Come along," the man said, brandishing the gun. "The girl also."  
"She's done nothing," Jack said. "She's an innocent."  
"There are," Keefe said, "no innocents. Both of you, come."  
"Where?"  
"To meet," he said, "the Master. Or I'll kill one of you. Your choice which."  
Jack spun, slammed the heel of his right hand up towards Keefe's forehead, but Keefe blocked it easily and, with a low grunt, punched Jack in the stomach. Jack doubled up and straightened, wheezing.  
"That," Keefe said, "is a very lame move."  
"Lame?"  
"Yes, lame. Shomen-uchi. Everyone does it. It's the looking up that gives it away. Bruce Lee never had to look at the target, he just knew where it was."  
"You're no Bruce Lee," Jack said.  
"Fair," said Keefe, "but I've got the gun."  
"And," Jack said, "I'm no use to you dead."  
"You'd be surprised, bastard," Keefe said. "We just need your physical being, in a relatively fresh state. Dead doesn't matter, for a while at least."  
"And now what?" Jack asked. "We’re going to shoot our way out, are we? Because if you hadn't noticed, there's quite a barney going on." It was true: gunfire, and more importantly, answered gunfire. There were occasional explosions and screams, and through the palace now there was a thin suspension of the yellow fog. In places it seemed to clump and cluster.  
The armed man looked surprised.  
"No," he said. "We go out the VIP route. Downwards."  
At a steel door, marked with diagonal yellow and black stripes, another white man was waiting; the second hood who'd chased him through the house. Same horizontal scars on the cheeks, curling at the ends, like worms mating.   
"This is Glenn," said Keefe. "My mucker. You've met him an' all."  
"Dudes," said Glenn. Dudes? Chandler thought. Oh well.  
The Door was marked with a crude drawing: a worm, eating its own tail: Ourobouros. Now that image he'd seen before, not only in the Ukolo MS.

He wasn't kidding, Jack Chandler thought. Downwards it was. The door slid open and they began to walk down a spiral steel staircase, into a space like the interior of a submarine: a place of steel bulkheads, chains, dials, gauges. Nobody would ever have guessed from the folksy architecture of the ground floor and upper levels of the palace.   
"I don't think many people came down here," Glenn said. He had what sounded like a slight West Coast accent, though whether real or affected wasn't certain. Maybe he really was a Californian. "Well, not and came back up again. Perhaps the girl did. Did you?"  
"No," Lucine said. "It was not allowed." There were white and orange arc lights casting black shadows from cables and stanchions.  
At the foot of the stairs there was a catwalk. It was perhaps a metre and a half wide, and the captives were sent forward along it. To each side there were partitioned steel cubicles, and in some of them were people, curled up or standing wearily. Bloodshot eyes stared at this new phenomenon. In one cell a woman had been chained by wrists and ankles to a vertical pipe; in another two men hung by their wrists, heads lolling. Both bore recent wounds and burn marks. In yet another, an indefinite human form was curled up, naked, and shadows running over its surface resolved into rats, swarming. A cell on the other side of the walkway was spattered brown and red but there was no longer anybody in it. There was a scream from a short distance ahead. Jack put his arm round Lucine and the girl pressed herself up against him.  
Even here the yellow mist hung, and as they walked into a cloud of it, Lucine started coughing.  
"She isn't immune," Glenn said. "Did she have the Fever?" He certainly seemed more conversational than the monosyllabic Keefe.  
Lucine nodded.  
"I did," she said, finally getting the cough under control.  
"Well, you know what the Master would say," said Glenn. "Unworthy."  
"You'd better let her go, then," Jack said.  
"Oh no," Keefe said. "Can't do that."  
And I know why the mist is down here, Jack thought. Because I dropped it here, stupid. As he looked at the nodules of mist it seemed as though they swarmed together like a living organism; like a flock of starlings, moving as one, but obviously composed of many individuals.  
"What is it?" he asked. "The mist?"  
"It's a swarm," Glenn said. "Not one creature, but millions. Billions. Recalibrating your DNA, bonding with it. It really is a virus from outer space, man, like WSB said. A motile all-viral creature. It didn't originate on Earth, any more than the ua did, and I'm sure you've been seeing the ua already - I can tell from the way you don't have any problem with the swarm. It slips down nice an' easy. Here we are."  
Here indeed. At the end of the catwalk there was a dock, and in it, a vehicle. A blocky cabin, raw metal with red insignia, the size of a Transit van. At the rear there was a large rectangular housing with grilles and vents. Ahead of the vehicle, rails headed towards a steel shutter slightly taller than the craft.  
"Her Majesty's starship," Glenn said. "The Queen's escape capsule. The Sovs installed it for her to escape if things got a bit too hairy up in the palace. Trouble is, we knew about it, and we've known about it for ages. Lucky one of their engineers was working for us all along. The Queen won't be coming with us. You will, though. Come on, get in." He stepped up to the side of the craft, unlocked a door which swung up and out.

The craft started up, agricultural turbine engine whining in the rear, and it rolled ponderously forward. As it did so, the shutter at the end of the dock rose and revealed a dark tunnel, ending apparently in total blackness where the rails vanished. The craft picked up speed and plunged into the dark.  
"Almost erotic," Glenn said. "Almost."  
Chandler thought there was more of nightmare about it. There was no driver; the craft was running automatically, and he and Lucine were flanked by Keefe and Glenn, still casually holding their guns on them, in a small but comfortable seating area. Occasionally Chandler could see a red flicker out of the corner of his vision - one of the ua, riding with them, but as insubstantial as smoke, as the viral cloud, until it wished otherwise.  
"This must have cost a bit," Chandler said. "Where did the Queen get the money from?"  
"A loan from the USSR," said Glenn. "Never got paid back, of course. The Sovs were sure the Queen would go over to old-style Communism, never mind that they hated kings and queens, and, she's quite a religious lady in her heathen way, and they hated religion as well. Then of course, the Evil Empire fell to bits. But Her Maj had her one-stop Underground system. Mind the doors!"   
The vehicle sped on into blackness.  
"The Fever," Chandler said, after ten minutes had ticked by. "The Fever they had here, a few years back."  
"What about it?" Glenn asked.  
"Was it the same thing? The viral swarm? Maybe some of it got loose, infected people in Ukolo and Akdaro?"  
"You got it," Glenn said. "But we didn't let it loose, man. It just happened."  
It just happened? Chandler thought. I wonder about that. Suppose it was a trial run, or a preliminary attack, doing an Aum Shinrikyo on Ukolo just to see what would happen. We know what happen; people died, others lost people close to them. All part of the Plan, I suppose.  
"Now stop talking," Glenn said. "We're nearly there. Gonna meet the Man."  
"The Man? What Man"? Chandler asked.  
"The Master," Glenn said, "of the Cross Ways."


	9. Chapter 9

When I found the translation, Chandler thought. There was … yes, something else. Nothing I found but …  
It had been in a sidestreet in Tangier, one of the old Arab quarter, away from the bustle of the Europeanised city centre and the touristy coastal part. Streets that rose up in steps to the warren of the souk, stalls selling you any number of things, carpets, teapots, carvings … all, then, designed to attract the tourist, for the locals bought their vegetables and lamb and rice somewhere else. He'd heard about this particular shop from an American couple who'd been staying at the Tanger Inn, in the room next to his.  
Ali Abbas, the owner, was a surprisingly normal-looking fellow; a fairskinned Berber, dressed in the red and white striped robe of his people, he might have passed for a bank clerk or a postman. The front part of his shop was full of bookshelves, crammed with books in English and German and French and Italian and Spanish; a motley ragbag where French thrillers (San-Antonio and L'Implacable) sat next to century-old copies of the Divine Comedy, Heidelberg with notes in German. There were maps, and rolled-up posters.  
Chandler looked around for a while and then Abbas came and stood by him.  
"Are you looking for … more interesting items?" he said.   
Chandler glanced at him, querying.  
"I do not mean pornography," Abbas said. "I mean … less mainstream books. I can tell you are a discerning collector. Come, have tea with me, if you have the time."  
He was plainly used to Westerners. We have no time, Chandler thought, none of us; but these people's lives are shorter, and yet they manage to have time. He followed Abbas into the back room, which was very much like a study - leather armchairs, a low table, bookshelves around all the walls. An incense burner was puffing an elusive scent into the room.  
"Look," Abbas said, when they were seated and sipping mint tea from glasses in ornate silver holders. He reached out to a side cabinet and took up a book, handed it to Chandler.  
The silence in the room was excruciating. Unbreathing, Chandler opened the book and began to peruse it. The text was handwritten, plainly Greek nonetheless; and the diagrams … there were the star maps, the picture of the worm devouring its own tail, the women in bestial congress with worms, the insectile creatures. They were familiar from the images he'd seen of the Ukolo manuscript. And yet the text … is this, he wondered, is this the key?  
"How much would you sell this for?" Chandler asked. Abbas named a price. Chandler halved it.  
In the end they agreed; the price wasn't important, and afterwards Chandler couldn't remember what he'd paid. He did, however, remember walking back through the souk, the book nestling warm and protected in his inside pocket.  
That night he dreamed that he was standing on a hilltop and above him unfamiliar star patterns hung baleful, the red of dying stars, and insectlike red figures flickered through the darkness. Then he woke and found that he was; that he was not in his room but was indeed on a hillside, looking out over the Tangier, in the dark. The book was still there with him. He stayed there until the sun came up and it felt safe to go back into the city again; walked down through groves of twisted trees, past cropping goats that raised their heads and stared curiously at him as he passed.  
Later, he saw Abbas in the bar of the Tanger Inn and asked him how he knew that was the book Chandler was looking for.  
"You told me," Abbas said. "Don't you recall? You spoke at great length. We were in there for at least half an hour. You told me a lot of different things. I sold you that book because you mentioned the original."  
"I don't remember," Chandler said.   
Now, as the underground vehicle came to a halt, he wondered: missing time? Both in the shop and up on the hill, as I don't remember getting there. Was that carried out by the ua as well? In which case, have they been watching me ever since?  
He wouldn't have been at all surprised.  
What he saw next would have surprised anyone.

***

If I was frightened when I first arrived, surrounded by these big men with guns, even women with guns, when they took me and Terrie into the throne room I was terrified.  
The place stank with that smell that I'd noticed before: in the throne room it was stronger yet. The room was a high domed space, once more carven out of the hollow rock, and in niches and crannies there was a yellow mist. People hung around, listless, almost like zombies, thin people, black and white. Most surfaces were covered with what looked like writing, though in no script I had ever read.  
Then there were other things in the room. Red creatures, tall, with spiny heads and spiky arms and legs. They stood among the humans - because these creatures weren't human. I don’t know what they were. They had huge eyes like aliens, or insects. There was a hissing crackling in the air, and once I saw one of the red creatures open its mandibles and there was another crackle; the creatures' language.  
The man on the throne, built like a wrestler only far larger, skin as black as ebony, his face broad and wicked, and two pale scars on each cheek - scars that curved down to touch each other. He was naked except for a loincloth and his huge legs were braced on the floor. We were brought to stand before him. One of the Africans and Ivan stood by us, unarmed.  
"Greetings," he said, and his voice rumbled deep inside me, as though it filled the space around me before he actually spoke, as though he was speaking through my blood directly instead of my ears.  
"I am the Master of the Cross Ways."  
I stood looking at him, petrified beyond simple fear. I still had no idea why I was there.  
"No, child," he said. "You don't, do you. But I say, Hail to the King."  
The crowd murmured and then swelled it to a roar -   
"Hail to the King!"  
"King?" I said. "I'm no King. I can't be King."  
"The boy who will be king," the Master of the Cross Ways said. "Do not contradict me, child. You will be king and this charming young lady will be Queen. Together you shall breed our new race."  
"New race?" I asked. "Anyway, we already have a queen." It was all I could do not to break down into a snivelling ball. I'm just a child, I wanted to tell him. Let me go.  
"Do you?" he said, smiling unpleasantly. "As we speak, she is deposed, fleeing the country. She seemed so strong when she was having people put to the agony, but she turned out weak enough. She cannot defeat the ua."  
At the word ua, there was a renewed crackling and hissing in the room. Suddenly I realised where I'd seen them before, or pictures of something very similar, and the writing on the walls: in that manuscript Lucine was keen on, and which Mr Chandler showed me at Jericho.  
"Besides," he went on, "the new race is already begun. There is a quickening in your womb, young woman. Your first born shall be ours."  
"No," Terrie said, just a whisper really. "No!"  
"You do not say no to me," said the Master of the Cross Ways. "You are in my power. The child is already of our people. What you carry within you, jeune mam'zelle, is more than simply human.  
"Do you not remember the Fever, Samuel?" he went on. "How you were immune to it? How your mother died but you did not even get so much as a cold? That was our doing, Samuel. You carry our genes, our DNA. All your base pairs are belong to us."  
"We can't all be immune," I said. "Mum died of the Fever. Dad caught it too, but he survived."  
"He was not your father," said the Master of the Cross Ways.  
"Who is, then," I said. "Darth Vader? Why do you say my dad isn't my dad? He is so. I suppose you're going to say you are. I don't think you're even human."  
"He … contributed," said the Master. "It is true he contributed his genes. But he grew fat, and lazy, and took up eating biscuits instead.  
"No, child, I am not your father. You are a hybrid, Samuel. Like me. A hybrid of human and ua stock. And the child of your coupling with Theresa here will be the dark prince of the new world."  
"I'll get rid of it," Terrie said.  
"YOU WILL NOT," the Master said. He gestured, and Ivan and the soldier took Terrie by the arms and held her tight. I launched myself at Ivan, but the Russian smacked me in the head, knocking me onto the stone floor, where I lay, out of breath.  
"Did you ever have your genes analysed?" The Master said. "Clearly not. They would find that there are certain tweaks to them. Still, no matter. You see the yellow mist? That carries the ua DNA. Four strands, Samuel. Not two. Those who can survive it will be changed utterly. Their genes will be prepared for the hybridisation. We shall breed a master race.   
"And those who can't survive it?" I said. I still lay on the floor and stared up at him.  
"Many will die," said the Master. "But they are cattle. Not worthy of the new world. You already bear it and the others are becoming infected.  
"I'm not a hybrid," I said. "You're full of shit, whoever you are." I was beginning to whimper, I could tell. I wanted to curl up into a ball, right now. I wanted to wake up in my bed back in Akdaro, or even at school, and find out this was all a horrible dream. But I knew it wasn't.  
"The drawings," I said. "That manuscript. Is that what it's all about?"  
"Of course," the Master of the Cross Ways said.   
"It was a clue. We planted it long ago, and hid it in plain sight. We warned you all. A pity you couldn't read the writing."  
No, I thought. But I know a man who can. I kept quiet. I very much doubted Chunderer would come bursting through the door with an AK-47, nice though it would have been.  
"It is," he went on, "an old, old language, one the Phoenicians happened across upon their voyages round Africa. We even told you where the ua came from: planets in the Hyades cluster. Weren't the maps obvious enough? Maybe they were too obvious.  
"Their sun is dying," the Master went on. "Many centuries ago they came to Earth, seeded it with their DNA but it lay dormant, as the language of the manuscript was forgotten, until those who learnt how to read the writing of the ua unlocked the secret." He ran a finger like a dark brown cucumber along the scars on his right cheek. I noticed that the insides of his fingers, and his palms, were as dark brown as the outsides; he might have been masquerading as an African, but I didn't think he really was one. I didn't know what he was. A hybrid; a ghost; something else.  
"This is the symbol," he said. "The interlocking of our genes and theirs."  
"Besides," he said. "It is irrelevant. The time is coming for the release of the mist. The viral swarm. Our agents are in all parts of the world - ready to release it. Then we shall arise to take the world that shall be ours. The ua shall breed with humanity, and you will be our king: your child its first born, and this place our capital. This is our land. The Black Land.  
"I do not need to speak to you, any longer."  
He stood up, a titanic figure, muscles rippling in the stark yellowish light of the arc lamps.  
"Take them to their chamber," he said. I was seized by strong arms and carried, toes sometimes touching the ground, sometimes not.

"Well?" said Glenn. "What do you think, man?"  
"I'm not sure I do," said Chandler. "I'm not sure I believe what I'm seeing."  
They were standing on a walkway, with the parked tube train a short distance behind them. The walkway surrounded a deep pit. Around the pit, stark rock walls rose up into blackness; and far up, as he tilted back his head, he could see stars. Then he looked down again.  
"It's almost like a James Bond movie," he said, "only without the white-clad technicians and the stolen missiles." He felt Lucine close by his side and put an arm around her.  
Instead, beneath him there was a chamber, with perhaps fifty people standing in it, around the edge of a huge circle. Not all the crowd was human: some had antennae waving slowly, spindly limbs moving: the ua. In the middle of the ring of people there was a circle encompassing a five-pointed star, and in the centre of that something like a man, but much larger, sat on a pile of bones. The whole thing felt wrong, like the huge human figure was really some kind of megatoad from the darker dimensions; the psychological effect of the ua, worming their ways into his mind like they undoubtedly had to all those in the pit below.  
There were two small figures a short distance from the central figure. Chandler squinted to look.  
"That's …" he said. "That's Sam!"  
"The boy who would be king," said Glenn. "Come on. Let's go down. There are … some people I'd like you to meet."  
"Bloody civilised of you," Chandler said.  
"You'd be surprised," Glenn said. "Mate." Far below them, the girl and the boy were being dragged away.

"Where's the start of the circle?" the Master of the Cross Ways said. Chandler knelt before him, staring up with loathing, his heels on the edge of the circle, his knees in a point of the star.  
"Nowhere," Chandler said. "You measure a circle beginning anywhere. I wouldn't have expected you to quote Charles Fort at me."  
"Quite," the Master said. "It eats its tail. Only you got the prize, didn't you? The girl - well, a few of those, from what I've heard - the gold watch, and the translation."  
"I don't have it," Chandler said.  
"Doesn't matter," the Master said. "The adepts speak the language anyway. I mean, it isn't as though you did much with the translation."  
"That’s what you think, fatso," Chandler said.  
The Master rumbled near-subsonic laughter.  
"Well," the Master said, chuckling. "When our operative Chi-Yien, whom you knew as Suzy, failed to knock you out because she didn't appreciate the drug wouldn't entirely work upon someone who didn't drink alcohol, we were forced to use alternative means. Trashing your gaff was precisely that. Got you on the run, didn't it, little man? Because your friends there weren't able to bring you in and have the operation there and then, when we had an operative on hand to perform it, we're going to have to do it here now."  
"Operation?" Chandler said. "What the fuck are you on about?"  
"To retrieve what we really want from you," the Master said. "The implant. I'd introduce you to your friend Abbas again, the fellow with the bookshop, only he's a little … indisposed."  
"You killed him," Chandler said, flatly, hating the huge man even more. And how long would it be before they killed him? Operation. Whatever it was, it sounded like less than a laugh.  
"Not me," the Master replied. "he had a little accident. I believe your friends Glen and Keith had something to do with it."  
Keith, not Keefe. Bloody Sarf Londoners. He was sure Glen's accent was a fake as well. Not that it mattered.  
"Abbas," the Master said, "passed you it in the mint tea. The translation was really a bit of a dummy.   
"This is a very little implant, Chandler. But it's set up home in you. No wonder you can see the ua and are virtually immune to them. Other people throw up, at least. Sometimes they even die of fright." He frowned.  
"But it's ours, and we want it back. Take him down," the Master said. "The child stays here."

Implant what fucking implant if I could find out what it did it would be ok is this some kind of radio beacon the big fellow says it stops me being sick when I see the ua so what else does it do why do I need to be able to look at them and not get sick must be some other function to it where the motherfucking christing hell is it fuck it sideways how much can I take of this shit?  
Chandler was tied to a gurney, face down. Around him there was a low whine and buzz of machinery. They really are going to cut me open, aren't they. Bastards. Fucking barbarians.   
There was a motion beside him and he turned his head to see.   
One of the ua, glistening red, its pectoral limbs moving slowly, was standing beside him. Its huge oval grey eyes stared at him - but without pupils, he couldn't even be sure of that. Its main upper limbs reached out towards him and it tilted its head down to stare at him more closely. This close, he felt no nausea whatsoever; the creature was just a creature, something insectile, it was true, but there was of a crab about it also, a huge crustacean, perhaps a lobster.   
"Can you understand what I'm saying?" he said.  
Chandler heard crackles and buzzes; the creature's voice. But at the same time he could understand it.  
[this-one understands you] it said.  
"What do you want from me?"  
[that which translates. Without it you would not understand. Without it you would go mad.]  
"So you're going to make me go mad?"  
[that is not important. That which translates belongs to us. It has been placed in you.]  
Something cold and hard touched at his rectum, and began to probe. Chandler gritted his teeth against an inevitable scream. The coldness spread throughout his body.  
"You're going to kill me, aren't you," Chandler said.  
[negative,] the creature said. [the ua are skilled surgeons. The Master of the Cross Roads said operation, not execution. Please relax.]  
How he could relax with that thing stuffed up him he couldn't imagine. Deep within him, something started to scrape.  
[you can,] said the ua. [be one with the probe. Do not resist it. It is not designed to hurt. We the ua do not hurt by intent.]  
You can hear my thoughts.  
[that is a function of that which translates.]  
Something clicked home deep inside him and he saw.  
The world of the ua … half-frozen cities in a landscape from nightmare, inhabited by creatures like giant cockroaches, trees that crawled across the landscape; and toiling figures very like humans, naked in the frozen land. The twin suns loured, one red and one white, like mismatched eyes in the sky.   
Then he was underground, a nest of tunnels full of foul smells, clicks and whistles, fibrous feelers brushing nauseatingly against his cheek; and there were the worms … starheaded, blind questing mouths hunting greedily, squirming over one another … here was an ua with a worm attached to it … the worm growing out of its nether orifice.  
No… the worms had not been penetrating the human females in those pictures.   
They had been growing out of them. They were egg sacs for the next generation of ua. Hence the worms representing eternity - they symbolise the succession of generations. The egg sacs would break loose from their parent, and grow, and hatch.   
Here as well was one of the humanoid creatures, though it had feelers on its head, it was more human than ua, far more; and it had an egg sac growing from it. Was this what the ua had in mind for humanity - brood animals? This was worse than any horror he'd imagined.  
Chandler squirmed on the gurney, trying to break free, and at that moment the probe clicked again and withdrew.  
The ua clicked, whistled and hissed. As the straps released, Chandler hauled himself off the gurney, and collapsed in a heap at the red creature's feet, trying to control retching and a sickness deep in his guts. The ua strutted off and left him to vomit.  
"Your problem is, bastard," Chandler said, to its retreating back, as he pulled himself up and wiped vomit from his mouth and chin with a corner of gurney blanket, "I speak the language. YOU taught me."

Queen Hannah knelt in a small room deep within the bowels of the Palace, listening to the gunfire and the screams from outside. I knew it would come to this, she thought; I knew. But she also knew her escape route was blocked, and like a cornered animal she was prepared to defend herself by any means necessary. The means necessary would no longer be physical, but spiritual.  
On the low altar before her, she had placed three lit candles and a bowl of water. She took a slimbladed knife and cut her finger, let three drops of blood fall into the water. The room was full of cinnamon-scented purifying smoke; none of the yellow mist had pervaded. From outside she could hear running footsteps, and a thundering knock on a nearby door.  
"Mam Tchembé," she intoned, "come to me. Seek thy enemy so thou may smite. Send thy waters against him and drown him. Papa Chango, come to me, send thy bright lightnings against him and burn him. Seek him who has let the dark ones in against us!”  
Something growled in the air around her. They are coming they are coming they are coming.  
Tchembé, the vengeful aspect of Yemandja, she who drowned the bad spirits, riding a leopard; and Chango, astride a lion, spears of light in his hands. Queen Hannah smiled.  
Then the door burst open. A figure with a black, insectlike head, two round silvery eyes and a human body, dressed in green camouflage gear, was pointing a rifle at her. A flashlight on the barrel of the rifle shone in her eyes and dazzled her.  
"Come out of there," the intruder said in muffled Ako. "You are no longer Queen. Long live the King."  
Mme Hanaruka Lamotte Adruga Yeshi Idje Majapura stood up slowly and faced him, hands outspread.  
"I know," she said happily. "But it's too late anyway."  
"Too late?"   
The man in the gasmask tracked her with the rifle as she came out of the room.  
"Yes," she said. "Too late."

"It is time," the Master of the Cross Ways boomed.   
Around him ua and humans were watching the Master in expectation. Jack Chandler was slumped against a wall at the side of the chamber.  
"It is time for the crowning of the new King," said the Master. By now the Queen will be our prisoner, and we shall go on to make the world ours. Bring them here."  
Moments later two people were standing before him, dressed in Ako costume: the boy Sam in black and orange robes, the girl Terrie in a blue dress with a white turban. Their cheeks had been daubed with the double-line symbol in orange paint. There was a distant rumbling like thunder.  
A slim figure was weaving its way through the crowd towards Jack. It was Lucine. He hugged her, pleased only that she was still safe.  
"What's going to happen?" she whispered.  
"We'll have to wait and find out," Jack said.  
The Master of the Cross Ways stood up. How is he that big? He must be three metres tall. Ten bloomin' feet. That isn't natural. Ergo, he isn't bloody well human.  
The Master began to speak, but not in Ako nor in English; he spoke in the ancient language of the Ukolo manuscript, the language the Phoenicians discovered in West Africa, the tongue the autochthons of this part of the world used to communicate with the visitors from the Hyades.  
"This is the right time," he said. "and the right place. For too long, my brethren and sistren, we have laboured under the yoke of the white man. Under the demands of the white man's market, his worldview. First we were the slaves of plantation masters, then we were the slaves of economics. Well, it is, I am glad to say, over."  
"Fair enough," Chandler whispered, "except he's no African. They're using you. And talk about slaves … we'd all be the slaves of the ua."  
"We are gathered together," the Master went on, "to witness before the gods the marriage of Earth and the ua. The crowning of the King and Queen, who will bear the first of a new hybrid race."  
One of the ua tottered forward to stand in front of Sam and Terrie. Both young people looked dazed; dosed with the Hyadic drug.  
"When they are crowned," the Master said, "we shall release the viral swarm worldwide. It shall be a celebration - a celebration of brotherhood between ua and human."  
Chandler felt something dripping onto his neck. He looked up. Water was dripping from the rocks way above him. The cavern certainly felt colder and damper than it had.  
The girl Terrie looked ill; her face occasionally contorting into spasms of pain.  
Something growled, within the rock.   
The ua in front of the young couple raised something in its hands: a circlet of silver chain. It placed on the head of Prince Sam. Then it placed another on Terrie's head. The girl grimaced again and hissed.  
I think she's going to spontaneously abort in front of us. Dear gods let this be over with soon.  
The drips from the wall were now a light rain. People in the circle looked up, baffled. The skyhole was as dark as it had ever been; with the artificial light in the chamber there was no seeing the stars.  
Then the lamps exploded.  
Something thudded into Chandler; he kept a firm hold on Lucine and pushed whatever it was away. Sudden darkness, complete and absolute, and terror rising in the schoolteacher and those around him. Amid the sound of voices raised, ua and human, he could hear rain. Inside the chamber. Slowly his eyes readjusted to the light.  
Light?  
The inside wall of the chamber was lit by a thousand tiny pinpricks of light, like fireflies; some kind of phosphorescent fungus, perhaps. The pinpricks grew into lines of light, forming a network rising up to the skyhole, a jagged network like lightning, providing enough light to see by if not as much as the lamps had given. It was actively raining now, pouring down upon the congregation.  
The Master of the Cross Ways was a huge darkness in the centre, like an absence of light. Above him, a node of light coalesced; a ball of yellowish fire, like a miniature sun. It began to descend.  
Ball lightning, Jack thought, looking away from the dazzling flame.  
The Master flung up his hands to fend off the thing but it swept down, impacted with his head, and he let out a roaring, horrifying scream. For a moment there was no human shape there but something vast and insectile, like a praying mantis the size of an elephant. Then the Master of the Cross Ways exploded. The ua in the chamber began to hiss and click horridly.  
"Open the doors," Jack called out. In the language of the ua. One of the creatures was standing a short distance away. Jack tapped it on what passed for a shoulder.  
"Open the doors," he said. "There are doors." The creature looked at him and eventually its feelers whipped around, signalling.  
There was a mechanical creaking and from somewhere a rush of cool air came in. At the side of the chamber, a set of steel shutters were rising, and a little way beyond that, past a chamber that contained a pair of 4x4 vehicles, another set of shutters was already open.  
A female voice wailed. Terrie?  
Then there was the sound of boots on the rock floor of the chamber, and voices shouting, rifle bolts clicking back; a squad of highly trained police officers crashing and thundering into the throne room. Among the black and brown faces Jack caught sight of a white woman.  
She glanced in his direction and she caught his look and smiled briefly, then turned herself back to the task in hand.  
An African man with a loudhailer was standing at the edge of the room.  
He said something in Ako, the message reverberating in the huge space.  
"He's saying," Lucine said, "we're all under arrest, and to lie down on the floor and keep calm. I think we better." So saying, she lay down. Jack followed her.  
"For those of you who don't speak the language," Detective Inspector Cordelia Evans said, her voice carrying clearly within the cavern, "you are all under arrest. We are armed. Any funny stuff and we will not be pleased." Her boots rang on the floor.  
There was no sign of the ua.   
They've hidden themselves, he thought. Sneaky bastards. I'd love to think they've gone away for good. But I think they'll be back.  
The man with the loudhailer was back. Afterwards Cordelia took over -   
"We want you all to stand up slowly and come along quietly. Any tricks and who knows what might happen. I'll be needing a full statement from each one of you."  
The weary crowd was standing up. Jack could see Sam standing in the centre, with a blanket wrapped round him..  
"Chunderer," he said. "I mean … Mr Chandler?"  
"Hello, Sam," said Jack.

***

Around the world, Ako people who had been prepared to release their canisters of gas upon their communities waited for the signal, and waited. No signal came. Eventually they put the things in a cupboard, or on a shelf, or simply abandoned them. In one or two places there were accidents, and mysterious deaths and illnesses that doctors occasionally linked to the mysterious 'Alakut Fever' which had claimed so many lives in West Africa, in that little country where they had all of that trouble recently. The incidents tailed off over the months, and soon it was forgotten, except by a few, who still watched for the ua.

In Alako, a new interim government was formed by representatives of the Ako, the Kilolo and the Asanti. One of their first acts was to order the Wall pulled down.

In London, a schoolteacher called Jack Chandler went back to his teaching, though without his star pupil Sam Tallu, who'd stayed behind in Africa to help rebuild his country. 

THE END


End file.
